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Spirit Gold 


By 

Louise Kiisel 



1920 

The Stratford Co., Publishers 

Boston, Massachusetts 




4 



Copyright 1920 

The STRATFORD CO., Piihlishers 
Boston, Mass. 


The Alpine Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 


©CLA597167 

17 /92q 


Contents 


CHAPTER 

I 

II 

III 

IV 
V 

VI 

VII 

VIII 

IX 

X 

XI 

XII 

XIII 

XIV 
XV 

XVI 

XVII 

XVIII 

XIX 

XX 

XXI 

XXII 


PAGE 

1 

8 

14 

22 

33 

41 

49 

64 

77 

91 

99 

113 

124 

131 

136 

147 

153 

162 

170 

175 

180 

188 



CHAPTER I 


O LD “IRON” SELBY rolled his eyes at 
the young man before him with what, 
to an onlooker, would appear languid, 
apathetic interest. These eyes were one of the 
peculiarities of the man which struck strangers 
on first meeting him. They were set high up 
in his big, heavy face with its world-driving 
look and were of an indescribable cold grey in 
color, wholly without depth or light, as though 
the pale irises were painted flat on dingy cream- 
colored marble. Their white glance was cold, 
swift, but unerringly appraising. 

But just now, as they rested on the young 
man a fleeting instant, it seemed as if soniething 
was flickering, wavering alive on their dead, 
icy surface. 

As John Buford Selby leaned with bored 
nonchalance against the big mahogany table in 
his father’s private office, he presented the ac- 
cepted ideal of rich men’s sons. His correct 
morning clothes left nothing to be desired in 
tone, fit or quality, and every appurtenance of 
his toilet was exactly what these articles, when 


[ 1 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


worn by a young sport of excellent taste and 
unlimited cash to gratify it with, should he. 

In personal appearance young Selby “had 
nothing” on hundreds of young fellows of his 
class in New York. Athletic training, under 
the best masters of that cult, had developed his 
physique to the highest possible degree, but the 
night life of the town had set its unmistakable 
tracery upon a physiognomy still boyishly in- 
genuous. Reared under different circum- 
stances, and compelled to make his own way in 
the world, the handsome countenance would 
have revealed a different story. 

Still there was something curiously alike in 
the countenance of father and son. The hard- 
bitten line of jaw and chin in the old face was 
as yet undeveloped in that of the young man, 
and the lax lines of the cold mouth of the young 
one conspicuously absent in that of the elder. 

Both old and young eyes held the same qual- 
ity, still dormant in those of the boy; that look 
that masks thought and sees clearly without 
appearing to observe, behind the mask of the 
most carefully hidden craft. 

“You wished to see me, sir?” John Buford 
enquired after waiting a polite moment for his 
elder to open the conversation, the glance of 

[ 2 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Selby senior remaining on the litter under his 
hands on the desk. 

“Not at all,” the old man shot with gruff pre- 
occupation. The implication brought a slight 
curl to the corner of John Buford’s cold lips, 
and his air of polite boredom changed imper- 
ceptibly to relieved surprise. 

“Pardon the intrusion,” he said suavely, 
reaching for his hat and stick, “but Burney in- 
formed me you wished to see me at this hour. 
Officious old ass, Burney — what?” 

The glint of something alive flickered on the 
surface again as the eyes were lifted to the face 
of the nonchalant youngster leaning against the 
table, then back to the pile of papers ; and their 
owner remarked, with the calm indifference he 
might have displayed in passing the time of 
day with a chance-met acquaintance : 

“I merely wished to enquire when you intend 
to stop raising hell and go to work?” 

Jarred from his pose of indolent indifference 
for the fraction of a second, young Selby stared 
at his father much as if that stodgy old party 
had suddenly cut a caper in the center of his 
costly office rug. 

“I — I don’t think I understand, sir,” was the 

[ 3 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


inanity his nimble brain offered on the spur of 
the moment. 

Old Selby flung about in his chair, at least 
he made as near an attempt at flinging as his 
stiff bulk allowed, grasped the well-padded 
arms until his puffy knuckles whitened and 
threw the words at his son with the spattering 
force of drumfire. 

“I asked, sir, when you propose to stop 
clowning it about this town and go to work like 
a man!” 

The words shot forth in a high treble, issuing 
from the close-lipped slit of a mouth with the 
startling unexpectedness of a mouse’s squeak 
from an elephant’s trunk. Work was a word 
hitherto non-existent in young Selby’s vocab- 
ulary, and he might readily be excused if, at first 
blush, he failed to grasp its significance in con- 
nection with himself. He was silent, regarding 
his irate progenitor much as he would have 
considered a denizen of another sphere had he 
found him ensconced in his pet chair, in the 
fastness of his favorite club. Tongue and 
brain failed to synchronize, and the moment 
was lost, for Selby senior was speaking with 
venomous incisiveness. 

“Three months ago I offered you a choice of 

[ 4 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


alternatives, to marry and settle down to a 
man’s business or else go your own gait, and 
this,” wheeling to the desk piled with crumpled 
newspapers and bringing his fist down on them 
with a vicious whack, “this is your answer!” 

John Buford’s face fell into the impassive 
lines of a mask. 

“This” he recognized only too readily as a 
highly colored newspaper account of a lurid 
night on Broadway in which he had figured in 
the leading role of kidnapping one of the “fin- 
est” and swifting him in a racing car many 
miles away from his legitimate stamping 
grounds. No harm was done, but the painted 
account spread on the face of a morning 
daily peeved old Selby far more than a graver 
fault of a different nature would have done. 
No names were mentioned, but the initiated who 
read between the lines knew that only one man 
could have pulled off such a stunt under exist- 
ing circumstances, and gotten away with it. 

“It is a waste of time to take you to task for 
your manner of living,” Selby senior was say- 
ing in quieter tones. “It is a course many 
have chosen, with varying results. You have 
chosen, apparently. Abide by your choice. 

[ 5 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


But I will say I am bitterly disappointed in my 
son.” 

The thin mouth of the old man snapped shut 
on the final word and he turned to his desk, pre- 
senting a broad expanse of lumpy back to the 
elegant young man who contemplated it the 
fraction of a second before reaching for his hat 
and stick. 

Recovering these articles with hands that 
trembled slightly in spite of his tense restraint, 
for a second the hard-bitten line of jaw and 
chin, such dominant features of the old “Iron 
King’s” face, showing curiously prominent in 
that of his son; only the barest fraction of a 
second the driving look held the boyish counte- 
nance, then with the cold sauvity that enraged 
the old man to the point where nothing less than 
physical assault would calm his feelings, John 
Buford said quietly: 

“I think, sir, you have succeeded in making 
yourself perfectly clear. I thank you for the 
more than indulgence you have shown me in the 
past, but for the ready-made future you would 
map out for me I must decline to thank you and 
refuse to consider it, for if ever I offer my life, 
such as it is, to a woman, I hold I have the in- 
alienable right of choosing that woman myself. 


[ 6 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


As a son no doubt I am a failure and disap- 
pointment to you. I am sorry, sir. Good- 
bye.” 

The note of cold finality in the last words 
caused the elder Selby to wheel and involuntar- 
ily half extend a hand, but John Buford ignor- 
ing the tentative civility turned abruptly away. 

Curious eyes watched him as he marched 
high headedly through the outer offices, but he 
glanced at no one, caught the speculating look 
in no furtive face, and when he reached the curb 
he hailed a wandering taxi, crawled into its dim 
interior and was whirled rapidly away. 


[ 7 ] 


CHAPTER II 


S ELBY’S destination took him out of the 
beaten track of the man about town to a 
number on Sixty-Third Street west of 
the park where his ring was immediately 
answered by a neat maid who smiled a demure 
greeting; and he entered as one assured of his 
welcome. 

Miss Aline was at home, the maid said, and 
left him to go upstairs unattended; and Selby, 
who evidently knew his way about the house, 
took the stairs leisurely and entered a pretty 
room where the girl he had come to see waited 
him, giving him both hands in frank welcome. 

“This is good of you. Aline,” Selby said, 
holding her hands while he spoke, “but make 
it better by getting a hat and coming to lunch 
with me.” 

“Not today, John Buford,” the girl de- 
murred smilingly. “I have a previous engage- 
ment.” 

“With Van der Spool, I suppose,” Selby sur- 
mised sourly. 


[ 8 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“With Van der Spool,” quietly. “What is 
the objection?” 

“None, Aline, until I have said what I came 
here to say,” and he led her to a chaise-lounge 
and seated himself familiarly beside her. 

“Aline,” he began without preface or hesi- 
tation, “will you marry me? Wait. Don’t 
answer yet. Will you marry me, John Buford 
Selby, the man, not Selby, heir presumptive to 
old ‘Iron’ Selby’s millions?” 

Aline puckered her pretty brows, regarding 
him intently from under narrowed lids. “I 
don’t think I understand, John Buford,” she 
said hesitatingly. 

“Then I will tell it to you in words of one 
syllable with explanatory marginal notes,” and 
he proceeded to strip his position to the skele- 
ton in the baldest, most direct sentences. At 
the end he asked her again: “Will you marry 
me. Aline, with only the remnant of a wasted 
fortune and what I may do with it to make an- 
other for you — me, John Buford Selby, the 
man?” 

Aline smiled faintly, regarding her slender 
pink finger tips with meticulous interest. She 
was a peculiarly beautiful girl with a rare 
transparent skin of a pure mat whiteness that 


[ 9 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


owed nothing to adventitious aids of the toilet ; 
her strange eyes were of an Oriental cast, blue- 
black, which looked immensely large in her deli- 
cate heart-shaped face, and which could have 
great inquisitiveness, penetration and sarcasm 
in them, but were usually lustrous and languid. 
She had tiny ears, slender feet and a general 
look of perfect, well-bred distinction. 

She had, in addition, infinite grace and an in- 
tricate alternative of vivacity and languor 
which was irresistible. Some men disliked her, 
but her very atmosphere compelled admiration. 
Selby quixotically thought he owed her an offer 
of marriage, and Van der Spool was madly in 
love with her, which sometimes bored, some- 
times diverted her, for she had an infinite ca- 
pacity for malice and a large, unfeminine sense 
of the grim humor of life. 

Aline Vannes was Southern by birth and edu- 
cation, Northern by choice and predilection. 
She hated the hand-to-mouth, humdrum living 
of the little town of her girlhood and loved the 
opulence and glitter of the city of her adoption. 

“And what does John Buford Selby, the man, 
propose doing with the remnant of his wasted 
fortune?” she asked languidly, a faint enig- 
matic smile on her lips. 

[ 10 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“Go somewhere and begin to make good,” 
John Buford answered promptly. “Will you 
go with me, Aline Vannes?” 

Miss Vannes shook a pensive head. “I 
should like to,” she said with a great show of 
sweet frankness, “were I different. But far- 
ing forth to fight and conquer the unknown, 
even hand in hand with the man I could count 
the world well lost for, would not do for me. 
True, I must marry, but above all, I must marry 
what the world calls well. Could marriage 
with you be called well?” 

Selby was the least caddish of his sex, but 
Miss Vannes’ plain speech gave him what he 
would have called a “jolt.” There had been 
moments, many of them of late, when he was 
reasonably sure, as sure as any man can be of 
a woman’s feelings, that Aline Vannes loved 
him. His own feelings toward this lovely girl 
he had never stopped to analyze, never under- 
stood that it is not man’s eager desire for the 
denouement that gives women pleasure in an 
affair of the heart, but a playing with possi- 
bilities, the exquisite unfolding of romance that 
leads them on, even when they refuse from the 
first moment to contemplate a possible mar- 
riage with the man. Miss Vannes’ nature held 


[ 11 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


a deep tinge of romance, but for all that she 
was a practical woman, a true daughter of her 
time. 

“But why Van der Spool!” Selby questioned, 
visualizing swiftly the crease at the back of the 
Dutchman’s fat, red neck, his small white-eyed 
furtiveness and heavy porcine jowls. But his 
excellence as a parti could not be denied. Aline 
left him no doubts in answering his last query. 

“Why not Van der Spool!” she asked calmly, 
her lips curling with the humor of her mind. 
“It is my duty to retrieve the family fortune if 
possible. Eliminating John Buford Selby as 
the possibility of combining duty with inclina- 
tion, thus Van der Spool.” 

Selby’s long sigh held relief as much as any 
other emotion. Where Aline Vannes was con- 
cerned the slate of his conscience was wiped 
clean. As for Selby, the prospective heir to 
millions, she would happily make him her hus- 
band, but Selby as simply the man, in spite of 
her tentative love for him, she had no place for 
him in her scheme of things. 

“Good-bye, Aline,” he said abruptly, hold- 
ing out his hand. “Thank you for the plain 
unvarnished truth. Great old virtue, truth, but 
so seldom properly appreciated.” 

[ 12 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“But a trifle passe,” she cut in coolly, “and 
one that Selby, the prospective millionaire, was 
never called upon to commend. Good-bye, 
John Buford, and good luck.” She laid her 
cool fingers lightly in his palm for a fleeting 
second, her fine eyes swept him with a glance 
that held a smile in ambush. “Believe me,” 
she finished very softly, “I wish it might have 
been different.” 

“It might have if we both were,” Selby an- 
swered cryptically, and with no other glance at 
her left the room. 


[ 13 ] 


CHAPTER III 


J OHN BUFORD SELBY awoke to the real- 
ization of another day. A moist, salt- 
laden breeze wafted deliciously against 
his throbbing temples as he gazed about the lit- 
tle room in semi-torpidity. 

When he closed his hot, swollen eyes and felt 
the stinging breeze, imagination placed him at 
Bar Harbor in his sleeping porch that clung 
like a limpet to the side of the giant pile of 
masonry old Selby called his summer “home.” 

But the burning thirst in his throat, the bit- 
ter, furry tongue with which he tried to moisten 
his slack lips, his mouth reeking with the slime 
of dead liquor, his head jumping with the slight 
exertion of rolling his eyes, reminded him that 
he had gone another lap of his own gait and had 
his father’s forcible permission to keep on trav- 
elling the same road. 

He lay a moment trying to suspend his con- 
fused thoughts, hoping for that fading away 
of material life which men call sleep, but the 
bed beneath him rocked and swayed gently, ag- 
gravating the nauseating heave of his stomach 


[ 14 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


that threatened momentarily to rise into his 
fire-lined throat. He fought the sensation, 
thereby banishing the last hope of slumber, and 
lay trying to think coherently, to connect the 
present with the immediate past, but the sodden 
mind refusing the office, and the ship for the 
moment ceasing its gentle rocking, he succeeded 
in dropping back into a lethargic dozing. 

When he woke again, it was to full conscious- 
ness of where he was and why he had come 
there. The how was as yet a confused recol- 
lection of tumbling into a taxi and whirling 
riverward, of the rambling shadowy dock with 
tugs and lighters tied up for the night, showing 
only riding lights and faint grey plumes of 
steam against the black river background. 
Then the muffled flight of a launch and the 
climb, or rather heave over the side of a ship ; 
then sleep, deep, sodden sleep for twenty-four 
hours from which he was just awaking. 

Selby forced his unwilling mind back over 
the sequence of events that ended in this long 
slumber, gradually straightening the tangled 
mazes into their proper order. 

On leaving Miss Vannes Selby had visited a 
florist, ordering a huge box of roses and an- 
other of chocolates to be sent to Aline ’s ad- 


[ 15 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


dress. The lady’s refusal of himself had not 
scored his feelings to any extent, and he 
thought, grinning sourly the while, of the gor- 
geous flowers and cloying sweets as a final of- 
fering laid on the bier of a dead romance. 

Then he mentally turned a new leaf, blotting 
the memory of Aline Vannes from his mind as 
completely as if she had never existed. He 
lunched at the club with Tressady and Holman 
who proposed a continuance of a game broken 
otf the previous night in which Selby happened 
to be a heavy winner. 

“Let’s put some new blood into the game,” 
Tressady proposed, and went into the billiard 
room in search of another man. He returned 
shortly with Van der Spool, and as the rules of 
the club prohibited high play, the four hailed 
taxis and went to Tressady ’s rooms. 

The hour was hard upon one in the morning 
when Selby glanced surreptitiously at his 
watch. No one betrayed a willingness to stop, 
and as he could not in courtesy be the first, 
though unspeakably bored, he got up and went 
to the buffet where he poured a drink of Scotch 
into a tall glass and tempered it with ice water. 

He had drunk much up to that hour, as had 
the other three, and as he sat sipping and 

[ 16 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


watching the players, Van der Spool’s unnat- 
ural pallor, moist hair and fixed, wide smile af- 
fected him with a keen disgust, untempered 
with the callous of familiarity. 

Van der Spool had been drinking heavily 
and would pursue that madness until sodden 
or unmanageable. No influence would restrain 
him, and in the last condition he was more un- 
manageable than a mad elephant and quite as 
dangerous. 

“Cut in, Selby; it’s your turn,” Tressady 
said. “Unless,” he added as an afterthought, 
“you all want to quit. It’s pretty late — I 
think I’ll drop for one.” 

“Drop and be damned,” growled Van der 
Spool heavily. “Prudence is the better part of 
poker,” he putfed. “He’s a prudent man who 
becomes conscious of chilled extremities when 
ahead of the game.” In his nervous anxiety 
to avert a quarrel Holman precipitated it. 

“Oh, come now,” he interposed, “we’re all 
good friends here. No use in slanging each 
other. Come on. Van — let’s have a drink all 
round and make up. ’ ’ 

“All right; that listens like sense to me,” the 
big Dutchman growled, and came to the buffet 
followed by Holman. 


[ 17 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“Good-night, Tressady,” Selby said, offering 
his hand. “I’m off now. Good-night, bunch,” 
he included the company as he reached for his 
hat. 

“Why — good-night — sorry the party has to 
break so early — ” 

“Say, John Buford,” Van der Spool swung 
round with a glass of raw Scotch in his hand, 
“aren’t you going to drink this round with us 
before you go?” 

“Thank you, no,” Selby refused coldly. 
“I’ve had enough.” 

“No,” Tressady also refused, “and if I were 
you. Van,” he added dryly, “I’d cut that drink. 
It won’t do you a world of good — ” 

“Oh?” Van der Spool came back with a 
heavy sneer. “Do you know, Tressady, I re- 
serve the privilege of acting as my own wet 
nurse ? ’ ’ 

“I’m advising you as a friend, but I’m will- 
ing to trespass farther and tell you something 
you evidently don’t know. Van der Spool. 
Drink makes a beast of you.” 

Selby, standing near the buffet, detected the 
sudden gleam of drink insanity in Van der 
Spool’s light eyes. 

“Van has been spraining something all night 
[ 18 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


in an effort to be insolent,” he said, placing 
himself before Tressady, and in that act receiv- 
ing full in the face the biting contents of Van 
der Spool’s swiftly flung glass. 

The Scotch stung and burned Selby’s eyes 
like liquid fire, the fumes in nostrils and throat 
strangling him for a moment, preventing a 
clear understanding of what he was doing. 
Dimly he heard the ravings of Van der Spool, 
stigmatizing them all as card sharps and cheats, 
and more vaguely still he heard the name of 
Aline Vannes coupled with his own. 

In that instant Selby saw red, and before 
Holman or Tressady could interpose shot a 
vicious blow at Van der Spool that sent him 
staggering against the buffet. Another fol- 
lowed, and the big Dutchman swayed dizzily, 
then falling his length struck his head against 
the corner of the davenport, and lay inert, 
sprawling like something useless thrown care- 
lessly aside. 

With a queer, animal-like squeak Holman 
huddled into a corner, mouth gaping, eyes wide 
in a horrified stare. Selby moved to the other 
side of the room where he stood, feet wide 
apart, swaying slightly, looking down at Van 
der Spool and Tressady kneeling on the floor 

[ 19 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


beside him. While they stared, the big body 
shivered slightly through its length, then lay 
still; so silent were they that they could hear 
the little clock cackling off the minutes and the 
tiny muffled tinkle of a piano in the flat below. 
It was Tressady who broke the silence in a thin, 
far-away voice. 

“God!” he said, his fascinated eyes on the 
sluggish trickle that began to ooze over the 
clammy grey parchment temple of Van der 
Spool. “You’ve done for him now, Selby!” 

Selby said nothing. Holman crept from 
the corner to the buffet and seized a decan- 
ter, shattering its neck against the rim of a 
glass. 

“Here,” he said roughly, “either of you 
want a bracer?” No one spoke, and he stood 
holding the untasted drink in his shivering 
hand. 

“We’re all friends here,” he said after a 
thick silence, putting the untasted liquor aside. 
“It was an accident that might have happened 
to anybody.” He fumbled for his watch as he 
spoke, and neither man noticed that he held it 
face downward in his palm. “The Ocean 
Queen sails in an hour. You can make her, 
Selby, if you move.” 


[ 20 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“No — I’ll face it, Holman,” Selby answered 
through stiff lips. 

“Face nothing!” Holman fleered in quick 
passion. “Van was drunk — it was an acci- 
dent, I tell you, and anyhow he had it coming to 
him.” 

His eyes shuddered away from the thing on 
the floor that had so recently been Van der 
Spool. 

Tressady went hurriedly into the hall, making 
a wide detour to avoid the object on the rug. 
They heard him yank the receiver of the ’phone 
from the hook. 

“Dr. Silverthorne ? Yes. An accident. One 
of my guests. Yes, badly. ’ ’ He hung up the re- 
ceiver with a bang and tramped back into the 
room. 

“Better fade, Selby,” he said with grim 
finality. “You can do nothing here.” 


[ 21 ] 


CHAPTER IV 


S ELBY found himself slipping down the 
ship’s deck in a smother of foam. Only 
a second previously he had a vision of the 
vessel lifting herself clumsily by the bows, like 
a great dripping seal shouldering itself onto a 
rock, then the sea rushed to meet him and he 
struck out blindly through the seething water. 

His head throbbed sickeningly, and he knew 
he must have struck it against some part of the 
ship’s ironwork as he was struggling clear of 
the rail. His arms moved mechanically, but he 
knew that he was losing consciousness. In- 
stinctively he struggled though reason jeered 
at the folly. 

Then he felt himself going down, down into 
the green depths of the ocean where the pres- 
sure was tremendous. He retained sufficient 
presence of mind to keep his mouth shut, and 
presently he began to rise almost as rapidly as 
he had gone down. 

When he reached the air again he took long, 
deep breaths and began subconsciously feeling 
around for an object to lay hold of. His hand 

[ 22 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


coming in contact with something, he clutched 
it, drawing himself as far out of the water as 
possible, filling his lungs deeply with the heavy, 
storm-laden air ; then he settled down restfully, 
with a glimmer of hope, for the object to which 
he was clinging with such a death-like grip, 
kept him easily afloat. 

There was nothing to be heard but the roar- 
ing rush of water, nothing met the eye but 
clouds and illimitable space of waves that 
lapped and washed with maddening monotony 
over the hatch to which Selby clung, drifting 
whichever way wind and tide chose to take him. 
He had no means of distinguishing one point of 
the compass from another, also no way of judg- 
ing in which direction the greater chance of 
safety lay. 

Through long hours he drifted thus, trusting 
to chance or to that Providence which is said 
to watch over children, the mentally incompe- 
tent and those in the very common vernacular 
designated as “souses.” 

Dawn came, striving to pierce the thick black 
smother of the storm, and after what seemed 
aeons of time to the hopeless castaway there 
was a lifting of the grey darkness, the rain 
ceased to beat upon his buffeted body, the 

[ 23 ] 


SPIEIT GOLD 


waves diminished, the hatch riding steadier 
upon the swaying water. 

With a great effort, for Selby was chilled and 
spent, he drew himself upon the little square of 
timber, clasped his knees in his hands and slept 
or lost consciousness, and when he opened his 
eyes again day had fully come, the air was 
moist and warm, a sickly sun was piercing the 
banks of mist that lay along the face of the 
oily sea. But there was still nothing in sight 
but wastes of waves that lap-lapped over the 
tiny refuge to which he clung. 

Alone between sea and sky he sat and dozed 
until afternoon when the sun won over the 
mists, dissipating them in thin whorls and lift- 
ing wreaths. Then the ocean became as a shin- 
ing desert floor with scarcely a ripple to break 
its glassy even monotony. 

Beal torture began for him then. The thin 
silk of his salt-soaked shirt dried on his body, 
which baked and blistered, tongue and lips 
cracked in agonies of thirst, and, when the burn- 
ing of the sun became intolerable, all the relief 
he had was to slide into the cool water and 
swim, pushing the raft before him; and when 
exhausted with swimming he crawled to the 

[ 24 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


raft, clasped his knees in his arms and drifted 
at the will of the ever-moving water. 

Long hours passed ; the sun dropped beneath 
the horizon, twilight came on, then darkness, 
the soft, velvety darkness of a southern night, 
star-powdered and balmy, falling like a bene- 
diction on his sun-blistered, hopeless misery. 

Hopelessly apparently, but after all the germ 
of hope dies hard in human hearts. He still 
possessed life, a worthless thing to him as it 
now must be, cut off from all that made it, in his 
estimation, worth saving. For, should the sea 
cast up its prey, denying him oblivion in its cool 
green depths, he must live always in hidden 
places, a hunted thing, with the blood of an- 
other man upon his hand. And should he go 
back, and in some way avoid the legal punish- 
ment of his crime, his mental torture would be 
none the lighter, for he would carry in his con- 
sciousness always the memory of the prone 
hulk and its ash-grey face, that inanimate bulk 
sprawled upon the floor which, before his un- 
considered blow, had been Van der Spool. 

As night wore on, a stiff wind that chilled be- 
gan to blow, and as he had done to relieve the 
intolerable burning of the sun Selby sought the 

[ 25 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


water for warmth, swimming and pushing his 
raft before him. 

Sunrise brought a glad surprise to him. The 
wind still blew with sufficient force to ruffle the 
water, and the air was quite clear enough to see 
distinctly as far as his limited vision permitted. 

On beholding it Selby thought that what met 
his view was the mirage of his own distorted 
brain, but long moments of gazing convinced 
him that he could distinguish on the far horizon 
the waving branches of trees. Not a large 
grove, but trees in any number argued land and 
even a desert island was far preferable to that 
aimless floating, until starvation claimed him, 
upon the open dreary water. 

Getting to his feet, he balanced himself care- 
fully upon his frail raft and gazed, and pres- 
ently he was satisfled that they were indeed 
trees that broke the even horizon line of the 
golden ocean; moreover it would soon be flood 
tide and the waves would drift him straight to- 
ward them. With renewed hope high in his 
heart Selby slid into the water and swam, push- 
ing his precious raft before him; and as he 
neared the dark mass they seemed to rise 
higher from the smooth surface of the water 

[ 26 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


and he could distinctly see the branches waving 
in the brisk wind. 

Abandoning the raft he swam with renewed 
energy. He was a strong swimmer and re- 
newed hope lent greater strength to his limbs, 
but it was fictitious strength, and just as he felt 
that another stroke would be an impossibility 
his feet touched coarse pebbles, and gasping his 
thankfulness he crawled beyond the wash of the 
tide, falling exhausted upon the sand. 

Selby did not know how long he lay where he 
had fallen, but when consciousness returned 
he was lying on his back upon the sand, the uur 
tempered rays of the sun beating fiercely upon 
him, his garments, salt-crusted and stiff, dry 
upon his body, which throbbed and ached in 
every bone and muscle. 

Sitting up suddenly, he looked fearfully 
around as though dreading to find himself still 
afloat, and the feel of solid land beneath him but 
the phantasy of a dream. 

Thirst was torturing him and he got to his 
feet, limping inland in search of water. He 
could not judge how large the island was, but 
thought twenty acres its possible area, and 
twenty acres was amply large space for one 
man to die upon. But first he would sleep when 

[ 27 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


he had his fill of water, which he prayed dumbly 
might be somewhere near at hand. 

As Selby walked, the stiffness left his limbs 
and he started at a rapid gait for the trees that 
bunched near the center of the island and which 
seemed to beckon with their cool, green leaves. 
He began running, but noted that the character 
of the coarse growth on the sand had changed. 
Sandspurs were replaced with ferns and things 
of richer green than grew near the beach. And 
when he broke through the low branches of mul- 
berries and palmettos he heard the grateful, 
musical tinkle of a purling stream. 

Falling face down he drank, and drank 
again, and when he could contain no more of the 
cold liquid he sat back and looked curiously 
around. A dozen gnarled and twisted hog 
mulberries and as many rough palmettos made 
the grove, with ropy, snake-like vines trailing 
over the sand. No flowering shrub beautified 
the little bosque, and what was a keen disap- 
pointment to Selby, nothing in the form of 
edible fruit or berries was to be seen. 

Skirting the grove, he found to his delight 
that his conclusion in this respect was not cor- 
rect; for, at the farthest point of the grove, a 
little apart from the tangle, a beautiful tree 

[ 28 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


towered high above its fellows laden with 
bronzy foliage and heavy with fruit a pale cool 
green in color, powdered with a delicate bloom 
like that on the skins of half -ripened grapes. 

Selby had never seen such fruit; but that it 
was edible he was reasonably sure, principally 
because he wished so devoutly that this might 
be the case ; and in its green state it might leave 
considerable to be desired in wholesomeness 
and flavor, but it would still the pangs of hun- 
ger that gripped his aching emptiness with 
sickening insistence. 

He gathered a handful of pebbles and began 
shying them at the fruit, and presently he was 
elated with the possession of a number of the 
little green globes. Selecting a fine specimen 
he wiped its bloomy surface along his trouser 
leg and sunk his teeth avidly into its flinty flesh. 

With the first bite his palate and throat were 
smeared with acrid juice and wherever it 
touched it seared, until the whole mucous lining 
of mouth and throat shrunk and drew, sprout- 
ing a white, furry substance that caused the 
whole oral orifice to feel as though he had taken 
a bite from the back of a deeply furred animal. 

Selby threw the devilish fruit far from him 
and fled to the spring, plunging his face into the 
[ 29 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


cold water, but this treatment only aggravated 
the effect of the sticky coat that covered teeth, 
tongue and throat, and all his frantic efforts 
for relief only enhanced his misery. Working 
to relieve himself of the unhappy effects of the 
cursed fruit he sat a long time at the spring, the 
sleep he coveted far from his eyes. Starvation 
now menaced him, for as yet neither bird nor 
beast showed fur or feather on the desolate 
knob where evil fate had seen fit to cast him. 

With listless hands Selby began a search of 
his pockets and was overjoyed to find a box of 
vestas and his silver cigarette case. In another 
sodden pocket his automatic pressed lumpily 
against his hip. Matches and automatic were 
uninjured, but the contents of the case were 
soaked; with the forlorn hope that they might 
still be smoked, he spread them upon the sand 
to dry. 

Water in plenty and a possible few mouth- 
fuls of smoke would stave off hunger madness a 
few hours and maybe a ship would pass. Yes, 
a ship was bound to pass sooner or later, and 
if it were later there was the automatic. He 
fondled the little weapon in his hand and con- 
sidered a full minute. Why not end it while he 
was sure of doing it well ? 


[ 30 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


While Selby was pondering the thousand 
thoughts that crowd the mind of a perfectly 
well man who thinks he is about to die, a soft 
rustling in the grass interrupted his dour mus- 
ings and some small living thing splashed into 
the stream near him. He did not know what 
sort of an animal it was and cared considerably 
less, for he could scarcely have a more disap- 
pointing experience than with that of the fruit 
he had tasted. The little creature stole along 
the stream, hidden by the grass and ferns until 
quite near, then the automatic smacked and 
Selby was upon his prey. 

He gurgled joyfully as he fished the carcass 
from the stream. It was a suckling pig, not 
large or very fat, but something that would fill 
his aching void and that held promise of other 
feasts to come, for where one pig was another 
must surely be. Nature thoughtfully provided 
them in litters and not ungenerous ones at that. 

Wasting little time on the dressing of his 
game, Selby scooped a hole in the sand, placed 
the little carcass therein, piled more sand over 
it and soon had a brisk fire blazing on top of the 
mound. 

His appetite would not wait the time for the 
thorough cooking of the meat before he had 

[ 31 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


scooped aside the sand and was wolfing what 
tasted to him better than the best fiavored meal 
he had ever enjoyed in all the years of his idle, 
useless, wasteful career. 

When he could swallow no more of the meat 
he selected one of the least damaged of his 
cigarettes and stretched out in the shade. The 
food heartened him, the indifferent smoke 
soothed his frazzled nerves, and he was able to 
think more coherently than at any time since 
the tidal wave had swept him from the deck of 
the ill-starred ship whose subsequent fate he 
could only surmise. 


L32] 


CHAPTER V 


T hinking, Selby fell asleep, and slept 
the dreamless, deathlike sleep of men- 
tal and physical exhaustion. Twilight 
was falling when he lay down to digest his meal 
and his God-forsaken condition together. It 
was still twilight when he opened his eyes 
again, the pearly twilight of early dawn that 
would presently blush itself into a fair, rosy 
morning, for the sun lingered just below the 
rim of the shining water. 

Selby dipped his face into the stream, then 
went to the place where he had cached the rem- 
nant of his pig, carefully wrapped in leaves, 
high in the crotch of a tree. The meat remained 
where he had stored it, but a disappointment 
awaited him, for it swarmed with ants and 
other insects, and, hungry though he was, he 
had not the stomach to dispute the food with 
the crawling mass that infested it. 

A long drink of water and a draw from a 
precious cigarette served for breakfast, and 
with his automatic cuddled in his hand he 
walked down the beach, hoping for the sight of 


[ 33 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


another unwary pig that he might be lucky 
enough to bag without too great an expenditure 
of lead. 

The opposite shore from which Selby landed 
dipped sharply to the water and was covered 
with a low growing scrub almost impossible for 
a man to penetrate. The ground, while well 
covered with a coarse grass in tufts or bunches, 
was a quivering ooze, but that the sinister cover 
sheltered pigs there could be no doubt, for, 
while Selby patrolled the rim of the swamp 
seeking for a likely place of entrance, several 
of the creatures jumped from their wallows 
and scuttled into the jungle. 

For hours he loitered, but the razorbacks 
were wary and withdrew further under cover, 
and Selby, becoming weak and giddy from hun- 
ger and the heat of the sun, was obliged to re- 
turn to the spring for another draught of water 
and a whiff of a salt-soaked cigarette. 

His way back led him along the center of the 
island. The walking was rougher than along 
the beach, and with despair in his heart he 
stumbled on, his moody glance fixed upon the 
ground. 

Topping a little ridge at the bottom of which 
the ground fell away in a small scar evidently 

[ 34 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


made by the rush of water over the island in 
great storms, Selby was about to descend when 
something caught and held his gaze, causing 
the hair at the back of his neck to rise and 
prickle in cold horror. Sticking up from the 
sand was part of a human anatomy. The thigh 
and shin bone, with a part of the bones of a foot 
still attached, lay exposed, and a few ribs 
standing out above the thigh indicated that the 
whole of a human skeleton was there. 

Selby went sick and cold as he stood looking 
down at the pitiful remains, for in them he read 
the mute testimony of his own miserable fate. 
No doubt the poor creature had been cast, as 
was himself, on this barren knoll in the open 
sea. Perhaps he had gone mad from hunger 
and ended his suffering ; or maybe he had been 
made of sterner stuff, enduring the utmost 
pangs until exhausted nature could endure no 
more. Overwhelmed by the story woven by his 
fancies around these pitiful dried and yellow- 
ing bones sticking up on the sand of his prison 
place, he stumbled to the spring, flying from a 
horror conjured from his own consciousness. 

The shade was grateful to his burning skin 
and the cold water gurgled invitingly; but far 
too wretched to drink or try to smoke one of his 
[ 35 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


indifferent cigarettes, he threw himself down to 
fight the hopelessness of despair. 

The mulberries were casting long shadows 
when his courage revived sufficiently to send 
him back to the edge of the jungle to try for an- 
other pig. Luck favored him; he got a small 
one with the expenditure of only one bullet and 
again roasted the carcass in the sand, devour- 
ing more of the meat than he wanted, having 
learned wisdom from his previous lesson. 

With the exception of a full stomach Selby’s 
condition was unchanged, but the food heart- 
ened him to such an extent that despair no 
longer quite overwhelmed him; but the grisly 
thing in the sand haunted him, banishing the 
sleep that might have come to wrap him in 
hours of blissful unconsciousness. 

Selby decided to replace the sand upon the 
thing, hoping thereby to banish its presence 
from his mind. This was a small respect he 
could pay to the remains of his predecessor; 
and who knew but that some one, at some time, 
happening on the island when he was as this 
other, might kindly do the like for him if wind 
and weather did not obliterate every trace of 
his ever having been there? 

With the sharp stick he had used to dress his 
[ 36 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


meat in his hand he went back to the ridge 
where the bones stuck up from the sand. He 
found the crust of the earth very hard, but after 
breaking it it yielded readily to his prodding 
and he scooped the loose earth with his hands, 
almost covering the bones in a short time. He 
had well-nigh finished his self-imposed labor 
when his hand came in contact with something 
in the earth which refused to be dislodged ; and 
thinking it might be a stone large enough for 
use as a marker for the unhallowed resting 
place of the unknown, he prodded vigorously. 

On his knees, scraping with his hands, Selby 
discovered that the object was not a stone but a 
wooden object that resembled a small cask. It 
was closely bound with iron hoops that broke in 
rusty flakes under the vigorous action of the 
stick. 

A small break sufficient to disclose the fact 
that the cask held contents aroused his languid 
interest and he worked the hole larger. The 
staves broke readily, disclosing small bags of 
coarse cotton canvas tender with age and mil- 
dew which burst when he lifted them, strewing 
a shower of gold coins upon the sand. 

Selby stared at the gold in incredulous con- 
sternation, then he carefully lifted all the bags 
[ 37 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


the cask contained and set them in a row upon 
the sand; and with his feet in the hole from 
which he had taken the treasure he sat a long 
time thinking, and his thoughts were very bitter 
ones indeed. 

Here was a treasure thrust on him by Pate 
after robbing him of everything but life itself, 
a treasure he would just then have gladly ex- 
changed for a meal of civilized food and a 
smoke of decent tobacco, not to mention a bath 
and change of clean raiment. 

Well, the money was his by right of discovery 
to do with as he pleased, and in lieu of any 
other pressing occupation he might as well 
place it where it would be safe. The irony of 
this thought struck Selby so forcibly that he 
threw his head back suddenly and laughed 
aloud in wild shrieking mirth that bordered on 
the insane. Then as suddenly his uncanny 
merriment ceased and he returned to a gloomy 
contemplation of his mocking, useless wealth. 

The bags were now dried of the moisture 
soaked from the sand and beneath the stain and 
mildew he could decipher fragments of words 
and letters printed upon the cloth. “Ham” 
stood out clearly upon one, and on another the 
part of some word ending in “burg.” On a 

[ 38 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


third one the word “Bank” was perfectly clear 
together with a date, “1850.” Selby pieced 
the various sections of words together and 
formed what he thought an intelligible sen- 
tence — “Bank of Hamburg 1850.” 

But that threw very little light upon the 
matter. Hamburg, he knew to be a German 
city, and these were perfectly good American 
coins of an early minting. 

Possibly the bags only were of German or- 
igin, which would detract not at all from the 
value of their contents, but if there was or ever 
had been, a Hamburg of banking importance 
in the United States, he was ignorant of the 
fact and the possible location of the place. Re- 
turning to a closer scrutiny of the bags, search- 
ing for a clew that might reveal the locality of 
the Hamburg referred to, on a portion of one of 
them, torn in the handling, he deciphered two 
other letters after the “urg” which he took to 
be S. O. or S. C. 

Selby pondered this as he put the bags back 
in the hole from which he had taken them and 
packed the sand upon them. Then in a flash the 
legend was clear to his mind. 

“Bank of Hamburg, S. C., 1850.” He was 
marooned somewhere off the coast of South 


[ 39 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Carolina. The ship on which he was a pas- 
senger and which had foundered was bound for 
the port of Charleston. He had drifted thirty- 
six hours before making the island, hut whether 
he was ten or a hundred miles from the main- 
land was purely a matter of conjecture which 
he must make a certainty as speedily as pos- 
sible. But by what means 1 

A beacon was the logical means of attracting 
the attention of craft on the water. Ass, that 
he had not thought of that before! Such fire 
as he had to cook the pigs was kindled in the 
daylight and would not be noticed, but a blaze 
at night could he seen far. Selby started 
frantically gathering material for his prospec- 
tive beacon fire. 

He discovered quickly with heartsick disgust 
that the island atforded very little material for 
fire-making, for after gleaning for more than 
an hour he had but a handful of twigs and dry 
grasses which he wisely decided to husband 
for cooking purposes, provided he was lucky 
enough to catch or kill anything to cook ; and as 
it was too late to try for another pig he indulged 
in a salty cigarette and lay down with his 
thoughts. 


[ 40 ] 


CHAPTER VI 


“y'~X -0-0-0 PEE! Ooop! Ooop! 0-o-o-p!” 

1 J This weird, melancholy call vibrated 
and revibrated across the island, shat- 
tering the cool grey silence of early dawn. It 
floated in sonorous waves of sound, invitation, 
exhortation, promise, all mingled in the long- 
drawn wooing syllables, and the voice that 
vocalized the sounds came unmistakably from 
the throat of a lusty human creature. 

But what manner of human, what his busi- 
ness, and how he reached the island Selby 
wanted very much to know before discovering 
the fact of his own presence there. If by any 
freak of chance he was sharing the island with 
a wild man whose right was' that of previous 
occupancy his position was indeed precarious. 
Or, if it happened to be some poor creature 
from the ship, crazed with hunger and days of 
floating in the water, he was a presence equally 
menacing and undesirable. 

Cuddling his automatic in his hand Selby 
crept through the grove in the direction of the 
sounds, and when he topped the ridge at the 


[ 41 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


foot of which he had found the “thing” he saw, 
framed between the drooping fronds of the rag- 
ged palmettos, the vocalizer standing on the 
sand, intent on rolling out his uncanny sounds. 

He stood near the rim of the swamp, with 
head thrown back, absorbed in his business or 
pleasure, whichever it was, serenely uncon- 
scious of the curious, hostile eyes jealously 
watching him through the screen of shrubbery. 
The intruder was remarkably tall and just as 
remarkably slender, his six feet something 
clothed in an old pair of overalls and a coarse 
gingham shirt, both garments faded to the ulti- 
mate. The legs of the overalls and sleeves of 
the shirt were turned back to the knees and el- 
bows, and both head and feet were brown and 
bare. 

These were not the garments of a ship ’s cast- 
away, Selby reasoned as he watched the unique 
performer. Neither were they the conven- 
tional togs of the regulation wild man; and 
after watching the creature a few moments he 
decided he was in his right mind, whatever the 
reason for his curious vocal gymnastics, and 
slipping the automatic out of sight strode boldly 
on the shore. 


[ 42 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“What the Devil are you doing?” asked 
Selby curiously, when within a few feet of him. 
The fellow turned, quite as much startled as 
Selby had been by the uncanny calls. 

‘ ‘ W-where the Devil did you come from ? ” he 
cried, starting back in almost alarm. 

Selby waved a dramatic arm toward the open 
sea. 

“From several miles out there. Will you 
kindly tell me where I am and what your start- 
ling vocal performance means?” 

“I kindly will. You are on Hog Island, 
thirty miles off the coast of Carolina. I was 
engaged in the gentle pastime of calling hogs. 
Been here long?” 

“A lifetime in retrospect. Officially only 
forty-eight hours. North or South?” 

‘ ‘ South. By yourself ? ’ ’ tersely. 

‘ ‘ Pardon ? ’ ’ 

“You-all the only one come ashore?” 

“Oh — Yes; I am alone. How did you ar- 
rive?” 

“Sailed,” waving a careless hand toward the 
water. “I come here sometimes when we want 
meat. Grandfather stocked the islands back in 
slavery times and the descendants of the old 


[ 43 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


hogs, with a few added for new blood, are still 
here.” 

‘ ‘ Then I am a poacher on your preserves, for 
I ate two of the animals since coming here. 
More would have been sacrificed, but they 
showed a marked distaste for my appearance 
and kept to the brush.” 

The young fellow laughed genially. “You 
are kindly welcome,” he said with careless 
courtesy. “But pardon me for overlooking 
the ceremony of introduction. Name’s Eaven- 
ell, of Little Canes.” 

The young man announced the name and place 
as though it were one familiar to the world, 
and Selby wondered whether Little Canes were 
a town or county. “My name is Buford,” he 
said after an imperceptible hesitancy, “John 
Buford, of New York, late passenger aboard the 
Ocean Queen.” 

Eavenell held out a slim brown hand, clasp- 
ing Selby’s fingers in a manly grip. 

“Glad to be of service to you, suh,” he said 
gravely, and stepping to his boat returned with 
a basket and quickly spread a hearty lunch 
upon the beach. 

“I reckon I have eaten since you have, Mr. 
Buford,” he said with engaging hospitality, 

[ 44 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“and will be at Little Canes for supper, if not 
sooner. Help yourself.” 

Selby needed no urging and wolfed the good 
food as only a semi-starving man can, relat- 
ing as he ate the story of the two pigs he had 
shot and ate, and of the green devil-fruit 
he had tried unsuccessfully to devour, and 
the startlingly disagreeable results of the 
latter. 

At Selby’s description of his predicament 
Ravenell laughed heartily. 

“I never heard of any one but Rebel sol- 
diers using green persimmons for food,” he 
said. “I know a Yankee couldn’t get away 
with it.” 

“Why did the Rebs eat the things?” Selby 
inquired innocently between bites. 

“Oh,” carelessly, “to shrink their bellies ac- 
cording to their rations. But I reckon your 
mouth shrunk too much before they got to your 
stomach — eh?” 

“As a shrinking proposition they are the 
goods,” Selby grinned. “The pigs filled the 
bill a lot better. Speaking of pigs, how do you 
propose to get them?” 

Ravenell took a sack of corn from the boat 
and scattered it along the sand, and before long 

[ 45 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


the creatures were sniffing and stealing out to 
eat, until the beach was quite covered with the 
black, ungainly creatures. 

“They come fast enough for corn, and I can 
take my pick,” Ravenell said, throwing himself 
upon the sand, a small rifle across his knees. 
Presently the rifle spit, and a shoat promptly 
hit the sand, hut the rest of the flock continued 
to fight for the last grains, undisturbed by the 
shot or Ravenell ’s striding among them to re- 
trieve his game. 

“Well,” said Ravenell, returning from stor- 
ing the pig in the boat, “if Crusoeing has lost 
its charm for you. I’ll take you off. There is 
room a-plenty at Little Canes plantation, and 
Colonel Ravenell will be delighted to have your 
company as long as you care to honor us.” 

Selby looked curiously at the barelegged, 
bareheaded, homespun-clad young fellow who 
proffered hospitality with the suave courtli- 
ness of manner of a Chesterfield, and met the 
proffer in the spirit with which it was tendered. 

“Crusoeing has become a trifle monotonous,” 
he said, ‘ ‘ and I will be charmed to accept your 
hospitality, and trust I will not be compelled to 
trespass too long upon your kindness.” 

“You will be welcome, suh, as long as you 

[ 46 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


care to stay. But the day is going to be a 
scorcher; suppose we drift?” 

And John Buford Selby, unregenerate son 
of old “Iron” Selby, many times millionaire, 
stepped into young Ravenell’s boat in nothing 
but the salt-soaked garments he stood in, ready 
and eager to face a new life as John Buford^ 
rescued castaway of the foundered ship Ocean 
Queen. 

Selby lounged in the boat, thoroughly enjoy- 
ing the swift flight over the glassy water and 
the very excellent tobacco with which his young 
host liberally supplied him. Occasionally he 
lent a hand with the work of sailing, and his 
mind was busy with the story it would be neces- 
sary to concoct for the satisfaction of his host 
before accepting his hospitality. Many per- 
fectly good yarns occurred to his mind, but 
were rejected on account of some small, un- 
looked-for discrepancy; until finally abandon- 
ing the whole scheme he resolved to let matters 
drift, working themselves out as emergency 
should require, for if the members of the family 
toward which he was speeding entertained no 
more natural curiosity than his present host, 
his poor affairs would excite very little interest. 

John Buford had not yet brought himself to 

[ 47 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


face the possibility of telling his true story, so 
he put the whole matter aside, thrusting it upon 
chance to decide, and turned his whole attention 
to the pleasant pastime of helping to sail the 
boat. 


[ 48 ] 


CHAPTER VII 


I T was late afternoon when Ravenell worked 
his boat into the estuary at the mouth of 
Little Canes River, then up the turbid yel- 
low stream a couple of miles to where the rem- 
nant of a dilapidated pier jutted into the water. 

Selby thought it a wild, forsaken spot, but not 
without a great, desolate beauty of its own. 
The shores were low and swampy, with many 
small sandy islands, from the edges of which 
snipe and plover rose in clouds, filling the air 
with the sibilant whir of countless wings, and 
plaintive, mournful pipings. 

Where the ground was firm there were 
growths of pine and gum, tall ranks of slender 
bays in the full fiower of their fragrant star- 
like white blossoms, and giant cedars hung with 
trailing weepers of silvery Spanish moss. 

There was no sign of a house until, coming 
into a wide glade which divided what seemed to 
be a primeval forest of magnificent water oaks, 
the white columns of the plantation house filled 
the far vista like the vision of an enchanted 
palace. 


[ 49 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


The soft grey stuccoed fagade faced the broad 
natural avenue, crowning the third of three 
wide terraces mounted by imposing sweeps of 
stone steps. The main dwelling was flanked by 
wings on right and left quite as imposing as the 
main building, and in the rear clustered a very 
village of offices and outbuildings constructed 
on the same improvident scale, and Selby, fol- 
lowing his host past some of the latter, dis- 
covered to his surprise that they were, with few 
exceptions, in the last stages of dilapidation 
and decay. 

On a deep side porch, screened from the sun 
by a magnificent jasmine vine in full flower, 
Eavenell found his grandfather reposing on a 
chaise-lounge, wrapped luxuriously in the rem- 
nants of a gorgeous embroidered silk kimono. 
Nearby stood a table loaded with reading mat- 
ter and smoking material of various kinds. 

“You are welcome, Mr. Buford,” he said 
kindly, but with a keen look in the old eyes that 
appraised Selby. “Make yourself at home here 
at Little Canes as long as you are pleased to do 
so. Eavenell, tell Absalom to see that Mr. Bu- 
ford wants nothing that can be supplied. A 
change of clothing and a meal will improve 
your condition, sir ; and then, if you are so dis- 


[ 50 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


posed, you may tell me your adventures,” he 
said with a courtly bow to Selby. 

Selby followed his rescuer through the main 
hall of the great house and up a staircase large 
enough to grace a public building. A gilded, 
ornate iron railing of early Georgian period 
guarded the stairs whose treads were bare, but 
black and polished as ebony with the rubbing of 
generations of hands no less black. Many va- 
cant niches broke the surface of the walls, and 
stained and blackened places where the rain 
had beaten through were varied with faded 
squares where paintings of large size had evi- 
dently once hung. 

It was easy to see that the huge mansion, like 
the many outbuildings, was only a dilapidated 
and decaying shell, though it was also plain 
what it must have been like under its ancient 
regime, with its tapestries and mirrors and 
handsome furniture of European manufacture, 
filled with laughing guests and bustling ser- 
vants, the aroma of smoking viands and fra- 
grant wines, while from outside came the neigh- 
ing and stamping of horses and the baying of 
many hounds. 

The big room that Selby was ushered into 
was in striking contrast to such of the house as 

[ 51 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


he had glimpsed on his way there. Its highly 
polished floor and furniture, its bright chintz 
hangings and two or three fine Oriental rugs 
wer« in a good state of preservation, and Selby 
thought he recognized the delicacy and refine- 
ment of a feminine touch other than that of the 
big, and very black negress that filled the 
kitchen door, staring at him with bovine curios- 
ity, as he arrived. 

Selby’s guess was correct; for when he was 
bathed and brushed and attired in the garments 
Absalom, the old butler, brought from his mas- 
ter ’s wardrobe, and was again on the piazza re- 
counting his adventures to the old Colonel, 
there was a sound of rapid hoof beats and pres- 
ently a girl, mounted on a splendid horse, shot 
into sight. 

Both horse’s glittering coat and rider’s 
clothes were flecked with foam and splashed 
with mud, and as she skimmed past she waved 
a brown-gauntleted hand and flashed a vivid 
smile before vanishing among the buildings at 
the rear. 

“My granddaughter,” murmured the Colo- 
nel. “When I am incapacitated she takes my 
place as far as a female can, and right well she 
manages, too. She has been riding the rice 

[ 52 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


dykes today, and superintending the working 
of the young corn. If Elise was a grandson in- 
stead of a young lady, Little Canes would look 
more like a gentleman’s habitation than the 
sorry place it has become.” 

There was nothing complaining or invidious 
in the remark nor in the manner of making it ; 
and the boy seated on the top step of the piazza, 
a dead cigarette dropping from his full, sensu- 
ous under lip, his long grey eyes fixed lazily on 
space, seemed to find nothing to resent in them, 
and had no excuse to offer for the fact that his 
sister instead of himself filled the position of 
overseer made temporarily vacant by the ill- 
ness of their grandfather. 

A very black and odoriferous negress ap- 
peared with the Colonel’s tray, followed by old 
Absalom who announced dinner, and Selby fol- 
lowed Eavenell across the main hall to the din- 
ing room where Elise, freshly gowned in some 
sheer white stuff that left a triangle of throat 
and dimpled arms bare to the elbow, waited 
them. 

She welcomed Selby in a quaint, pretty 
Southern way, playing hostess with the accom- 
plished grace and sang-froid of a woman of the 
big world, yet with a girlish simplicity as de- 
[ 53 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


void of self-consciousness as that of a perfectly 
trained child. 

In the flashing glimpse he had of her as she 
galloped by on her horse Selby divined she 
might be pretty, but a nearer view proved her 
even something more; for besides her lovely 
face and figure everything about her showed 
the fineness of race. 

Her curved lips were vividly scarlet against 
a skin as softly lustrous as cream-colored satin, 
her eyes, grey like the edges of broken glass, 
were fringed with a double row of long black 
lashes that gave their calm, direct gaze a qual- 
ity of startling intensity. Ravenell, her senior 
by two years, was an ugly replica of her loveli- 
ness. Her rounded grace was in him awkward 
lankiness, her creamy skin dull swarthiness. 
The full curled lips of both were as richly scar- 
let, but Ravenell’s were lacking in the humor 
and character expressed in hers, and while his 
eyes were as deeply fringed and of the same in- 
describable color, there was an absence of the 
mentality that sparkled in those of Elise, and 
their extraordinary beauty added only another 
touch of effeminacy to a countenance already 
marred pronouncedly by that quality. 

[ 54 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


As Selby’s intimacy progressed with the 
family at Little Canes, he discerned as sharp a 
contrast in the relative characters of Elise and 
her brother ; how the girl ’s level gaze mirrored 
her transparent, candid mind, and her close 
curled lips her fearlessness and courage in 
working to overcome the trying adversities of 
her condition. 

Selby’s place at Little Canes seemed to have 
been waiting for him, so easily did he fall into 
the daily routine there. The family, recogniz- 
ing in him the bonds of caste, passed him im- 
perceptibly from the position of idle guest to 
that of the more congenial and satisfactory 
place of working member of their little world. 
True, he was supremely ignorant of the cul- 
tural method of any plant save the wild oat, but 
he was a tireless horseman, and under the tire- 
less instruction of Elise and the big yellow fore- 
man soon mastered the rudiments of what it 
was necessary for a cotton plantation overseer 
to know. 

It was not expected that Eavenell should take 
any part in the work of the plantation, his time 
being spent in the manner that pleased himself ; 
his going and coming were entirely his own af- 
fairs. His rifle and rod kept the table of Little 

[ 55 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Canes bountifully supplied with game and sea 
food, but for days together his place there was 
vacant, and on one of those occasions Selby 
learned, quite by accident, that his bed also had 
been unoccupied. 

Young Eavenell thought little of the bed and 
board of the plantation mansion. He was as 
familiar with the creeks and rivers of the dis- 
mal Santee as with the palm of his own hand, 
and wherever night overtook him there was 
probably a tent or cabin of his own on a sandy 
hammock where he could live indefinitely if so 
disposed. 

None of these shacks were located on the in- 
ner fringe of islands, many of which were culti- 
vated. He favored the far sandy barrens 
which were stocked with razorbacks, the wild 
progeny of the first pigs planted there in the 
early days of his grandfather’s possession. 

The creatures required no attention, a fact 
that failed to explain to Selby Ravenell’s ex- 
planation of his frequent and long absences 
from the plantation house. 

The real reason came one morning as they 
breakfasted together on the shores of Sand 
Island. They were out for summer duck and 
young mullet and were making an al fresco 
[ 56 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


meal of the latter with hot corn pone and coffee 
cooked to the nth degree of perfection by 
Ravenell’s personal retainer, a swamp darkey 
frightful of visage and apparently ignorant of 
any language except a few words of the queer 
swamp dialect. 

They were lying at peace, digesting the excel- 
lent meal, when Eavenell rolled over in the 
sand, lighted another of his inevitable cigar- 
ettes and remarked without any prefatory in- 
troduction : 

“Somewhere there is a man-sized fortune 
that, when I find, will make a mighty heap of 
difference to me. ’ ’ 

Startled from thoughts that were, curiously 
enough, running along the same line, Selby re- 
garded the thin brown face with the beautiful 
womanish eyes curiously. 

“What will you do with it?” he asked idly. 
“Restore the house and rebuild the broken 
dykes? Would you use it to materialize Miss 
RavenelPs ambition of restoring Little Canes 
to its old-time glory and productiveness?” 

“Like a shot I would,” Ravenell fleered 
sourly. “It will be Paree and the bright 
lights for me. I am eternally fed up with the 
monotony of life in the Santee.” 

[ 57 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“But the treasure — how did it come where 
it is, and where is it supposed to he secreted? 
I am interested if the subject is not taboo.” 

“It is no secret,” Ravenell told Selby, 
“though grandfather seldom speaks of this 
episode in his life. It happened in the fifties, 
eighteen fifty, to be exact. In the fall of that 
year grandfather gathered a little army of 
slaves from all his holdings in the Santee and 
sent them to the slave market at Hamburg, a 
town up the Savannah River. They brought 
good prices, and grandfather brought the 
money in gold to Little Canes, intending to take 
it abroad for reinvestment, later. But he 
never did. One night a slave driver, a sinister 
devil from some of the Spanish possessions 
with two nigger accomplices, broke into the 
strong room and made off with the box, or kit, 
and put to sea in a sailboat belonging to the 
plantation. 

‘ ‘ The alarm was sent out along the coast and 
to inland places, but no trace of them was ever 
found. Small armies of men and dogs combed 
the Santee for weeks, but without success in 
finding even the boat or anything belonging to 
her. They simply vanished. 

“I’ve figured it out hundreds of times, recon- 
[ 58 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


structed it as I went over the ground. Grand- 
father says that night it was blowing a gale 
from the southeast, and they were in a sail- 
boat. 

“As usual, the wind and sea must have been 
coming in on a line with the shore, which would 
make it necessary for them to put off on the 
starboard tack. That would have carried them 
straight to the islands. If they’d tacked they’d 
have a rough beat to windward in bad water. 
They could have rounded the islands and 
worked up under the lee, but once clear they 
would have got the full weight of the wind and 
sea again, and I don’t believe they’d dare put to 
sea under such conditions. 

“That money was in gold, and they realized 
if the boat swamped she would go to the bottom 
like lead. I don’t believe they ever tried to put 
to sea.” 

“Your theory is they went up the river?” 
Selby asked casually, dissembling his poignant 
interest in Ravenell’s story. 

“Yes. But I think their first act was to hide 
the kit. Think ! People at the ports and along 
the coast would be on the lookout for them, but 
they could avoid that by working up the river 
and making for the interior of the Santee. But 


[ 59 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


before attempting that they would have hidden 
the money in order to be able to leave the boat 
if danger threatened, and they would have 
cached the loot as near the water as possible, 
with the idea of coming back for it later. ’ ’ 

“You have doped it out all right,” said Selby, 
grinning. ‘ ‘ There seems nothing to do but get 
a shovel and dig.” 

RavenelPs snort to this proposition was 
semi-amused, semi-disgusted. “I’ve dug all 
right,” he said petulantly, “and every bally 
island in the group has an army of diggers. 
Pigs, you know, will root, especially razorbacks, 
and the shorter the rations the deeper and 
harder they root. Oh, they dig, all right, but 
up to date there is nothing in the trenches they 
uncover. ’ ’ 

“Have you tried other means — ^worked the 
divining-rod theory, for instance? I’ve heard 
dimly of such things.” 

“Have I? I’ve tried every scheme I ever 
heard of. Consulted a mining engineer who 
had been a prospector half his life. In his 
opinion there is ‘no sich animal’ as a divining 
rod. Said if a fellow ever did discover such an 
instrument he wouldn’t sell it — wouldn’t have 
to. I’ve also tried every ‘treasure finder’ in 

[ 60 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


the Santee, and that’s why I’ve told the story. 
I want you to come in on it. Saw another one 
down in Georgetown last week, and have every- 
thing planned. Only waiting the propitious 
time. ’ ’ 

“And when is the propitious moment, if that 
is no dark, deadly secret?” Selby asked, re- 
garding the boy with an amused curiosity. 

“Oh, about the twentieth, I reckon. These 
fellows will work only on certain nights in the 
month — when the moon is just so. Can’t work 
in the full or the dark, and you have to humor 
’em.” 

“Another hoo-doo worker?” Selby laughed. 

“Yes. And the best I ever heard of,” Rav- 
enell admitted seriously. “I’ll admit most 
of these fellows are dirty fakes, but occasion- 
ally one of them has the goods. I tell you, 
Buford, the things these niggers do are in- 
explicable. To your city-bred, matter-of-fact 
Yankee mind they are foolishness, but if you 
live long enough in the Santee and gain the real 
confidence of the right ones you’ll see things 
that will make you think you are in the heart of 
darkest Africa before a white man ever landed 
there.” 

“I’m not from the Ozarks, but I’m willing 
[ 61 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


to be shown,” Selby admitted cheerfully. 
“Count me in on the treasure hunt. Will the 
worker of uncanny wonders perform before 
an unbeliever?” 

“If I vouch for you and you promise to keep 
your mouth shut,” Ravenell answered, sulking 
a trifle under Selhy’s raillery. “I don’t want 
Elise or grandfather to suspect what’s afoot. 
Say nothing and do nothing until I give the 
word. I can trust you?” 

“To the death, old top, and then some!” 
cried Selby, striking a grotesque attitude. 
“Old Trusty would never have won name and 
fame had I been anywhere about.” 

“Then that’s all right,” Ravenell grinned, 
restored to good humor by Selby’s foolery. 
“You’ll hear from me when it’s the right time 
of the moon.” 

On the journey back to the plantation Raven- 
ell’s talk was all of Paris, Monte Carlo and 
what he considered other wonder places of the 
world, and of what he would see and enjoy 
when he succeeded in finding the money for 
which he sought. The boy had been partly 
educated abroad, but the family began to feel 
the pinch of poverty before he was old enough 
to see the French capital on his own account. 

[ 62 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Then he was brought to Little Canes which, 
with the picturesque old towns of Georgetown 
and Charleston, had been the theatre of his ex- 
istence ever since. Consideration of his sis- 
ter and grandfather never entered into his 
scheme of things should he find the treasure, 
and Selby gathered that the old plantation 
might moulder into complete decay for aught 
he eared while he chased the rainbow pleasures 
of “Life’ —always with a capital L, of which 
he dreamed. 

Listening to the tales of his intended doings, 
Selby resolved that the treasure should remain 
on Hog Island forever for all the help he would 
give in putting it to such a use, or in fact In be- 
ing instrumental in putting it into the hands at 
all of the wild, selfish young cub before him. 


[ 63 ] 


CHAPTER VIII 


T he days immediately following the re- 
hearsal of this bit of family history by 
the Ravenell cub was a trying period to 
the soul of John Buford Selby. The conscious- 
ness of the bags of coin cached in the sand of 
Hog Island lay like an incubus on his spirit, and 
but for the many times expressed determina- 
tion of the thoroughly irresponsible and self- 
willed youth to scatter the hoard, should it by 
chance fall into his clutches, in riotous living 
and following after ambiguous pleasures, the 
course would have been plain and easy. 

Selby told himself he would, with fine large 
unselfishness, act the God from the machine to 
these people with their fierce pride of name, un- 
heard of outside the limits of their run-to-seed 
plantation, and with their pathetic clinging to 
a place in a decayed and buried past. 

What a godsend the fortune, small enough 
from the standard from which Selby reckoned 
fortunes, would be to them! How much it 
would mean to Elise in gratification of girlish 
fancies and enjoyments of things of which she 
now was deprived ! 


[ 64 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Then cold reason asserted itself, demanding 
what assurance had he for assuming that the 
coin on Hog Island and that looted from the 
Colonel were one and the same. 

Also, how could he know that the planter 
would recognize the treasure as that same 
taken from his strong box so long ago and ap- 
propriate it to himself without question or 
cavil? 

With his knowledge of the old man’s meticu- 
lous honesty Selby knew he would not, and as 
yet he was not reconciled to the sacrificing of it 
to the State under whose soil it had been so 
miraculously discovered. 

On the other hand, chances of appropriating 
it himself were nil. To pirate a dory from the 
plantation wharf, reach the island and dig the 
treasure unmolested were simple proceedings. 
He could do all this and make his way to 
Georgetown or even Charleston, the only logi- 
cal outlets from the Santee, but in either place 
a stranger sailing a Little Canes boat with a 
cargo of old gold coin could not hope to escape 
curious comment and perhaps something more. 

No. The cursed stuff must remain where it 
had been since it was taken from where it 
rightfully belonged. Meantime, should some 
[ 65 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


meddlesome swamp rattler take it into its poi- 
sonous head to eliminate him and his knowledge 
of the gold, no one would feel the poorer for his 
silence. 

So thinking, Selby put aside all half-baked 
schemes of flitting from the Santee between 
suns in search of a haven of safety in some 
comic opera kingdom to the south, or some 
painted island lapped in southern seas, resolv- 
ing to leave the tangle to Chance, which has a 
way of solving all riddles in its own way in its 
own good time. 

After all, life at Little Canes was pleasant 
enough though deadly dull at times to a man 
nurtured on the glare and excitement of life 
and whose principal occupation was hitherto 
nothing more strenuous than clipping the 
painted wings of Pleasure as she flew ; still the 
work he had taken on himself interested him, 
and riding the rice dykes in the still, rosy hours 
of early morning was an experience that as yet 
had not begun to pall. And when Elise Raven- 
ell on her beautiful chestnut mare, the mysteri- 
ous light of the wonderful daybreak in her calm 
grey eyes, rode beside him, the pleasure soon 
grew to mean infinitely more. 

Selby was essentially a man of the world, 

[ 66 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


wise in his generation, who knew the possible 
worst too young and now was beginning to 
learn a little of what the best can be. He well 
knew the emotion he felt for the fine-natured, 
beautiful mistress of Little Canes was some- 
thing he had never felt before, and never would 
again. 

Women were by no means strangers in his 
life prior to his advent in the Santee. He had 
known them, many and various, “good” and 
otherwise, but the most charming of the sex 
had left him strangely cold. 

Perhaps his position as prospective heir to 
millions warped an otherwise clear judgment 
where they were concerned and caused him to 
look for the ulterior motive behind the kindness 
alike of maid and matron of his own set. To 
his jaundiced eyes, accustomed to looking 
at life through the golden mist of his father’s 
ingots, the modest advance of honest friend- 
ship seemed an invitation, and the frank cama- 
raderie of buoyant girlhood a palpable snare. 

Yet Selby was neither a libertine nor a prig. 
He was simply a male with all the masculine in- 
stincts for the chase inherent. All the desir- 
able things of life had been his as a matter of 
course, supplied by the careless bounty of a 
[ 67 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


parent too absorbed in the accumulating of 
useless gain to trouble about how his son spent 
either time or cash. Money accumulated by a 
Selby could be spent by another Selby without 
thought, but to accept a mate of another man’s 
choosing, even though the man were his own 
father, was to be denied the right even to be 
called a man. 

Sometimes, in those grim first days when 
Selby rode alone over Little Canes plantation, 
his heart was very bitter. Not at his father, 
for he loved the irascible old boy dearly in spite 
of the latter’s wish to bend every condition in 
life to his iron will, but at Chance or Pate that 
had played him the malignant trick of thrusting 
him so summarily from his place in the sun 
of wealth and circumstance into that of hired 
dependent of the grandfather of the woman he 
would give his right arm to approach in his own 
proper person. 

Certainly he had no guarantee that even in 
his proper person as John Buford Selby, heir 
to old “Iron” Selby’s millions, he could win 
her regard, but he knew himself reasonably 
sure that a girl of her ambition and caliber 
would never drop her regard to plain Mr. Bu- 
ford who came from God knew where and who 


[ 68 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


was the Devil knew who, besides the hired over- 
seer of her grandfather’s old run-to-seed plan- 
tation. 

Love of a sort comes to all vigorous and vital 
youngsters, sometimes more than once, as that 
“internal infernal itching which you can’t 
scratch,” but to the mature man it comes as the 
vital necessity like food or water or the need of 
air. It will not be denied, and, when circum- 
stances force denial, the man lives on with a 
sick spot in his soul. The boy or girl can find 
diversion elsewhere, but the man or woman 
cannot, for there remains always that hunger- 
ing sense of an unfilled want. The love of a 
grown man for the woman he knows to be his 
natural mate is an abstract proposition which 
admits of no evasion or apology. It is a divine 
axiom and a primary one. Selby knew that 
Elise was his mate, the woman intended for 
him from the beginning of things; but he also 
recognized his love as hopeless, for he had frit- 
tered away in sloth and self-indulgence the 
most important period of his life which should 
have been spent in laying the foundations of a 
career, and now he was no man’s man, and had 
therefore no right to aspire to be any woman’s. 

All this Selby told himself when he reasoned 

t'69] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


sanely in the lonely hours on the dykes or under 
the shade of a tree near the cotton fields where 
the black men toiled. But in the evening, when 
he filled his appointed place at the left hand of 
Elise at the round mahogany dinner table, 
meeting the cool, level gaze of her grey eyes or 
watching the flush creep under the ivory oval of 
her cheek and the glinting lights on the dusky 
coils of her hair, he reasoned dilferently. 

After all he was a man and she was the 
woman he wanted for his mate. He was ready 
to fight any odds to win her, but he knew that 
respect, with her, must precede any warmer, 
more intimate emotion; and with the details of 
his life immediately previous to his advent at 
Little Canes familiar to her, he felt that her re- 
gard for such as he must border close on pity- 
ing contempt. 

Prom the first the Ravenells accepted Selby 
at his face value. They recognized in him the 
bonds of caste, and common caste is to the 
Southerner of culture and breeding the pass- 
port to his unstinted hospitality. Selby’s 
breeding and culture were evident, and the 
charm of his presence did much to brighten the 
lonely old plantation house. His brilliant talks 
of a world of men and women from which the 


[ 70 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


old planter had been so long excluded by ill 
health and stress of circumstances were tonic 
in their effect on the Colonel, and in the seclu- 
sion of the swamp-girdled plantation, with the 
improbability of an outsider, who knew the mis- 
erable cause of his downfall, liable to intrude, 
Selby felt he might in time recover his bearings 
and do the thing his manhood demanded in the 
situation. 

But not yet. He must have time. But some- 
times, in the velvet blackness of the nature- 
haunted dark, alive with myriad voices of 
creeping and growing things, or when the 
Southern moon poured like a searchlight from 
the low-hung skies and the poignant voices of 
night birds called and trilled their love-notes to 
their brooding mates, he felt he must return to 
that from which he had fled. 

But first he must tell the gentle, confiding old 
patriarch and the proud girl for whose respect 
and confidence he would sacrifice life itself that 
he was a hunted man, a being with the blood of 
a fellow man upon his soul. 

Then would come deep lethal sleep to soothe 
his wracked emotions, and the mist-wreathed 
dawning, its sweet silence ruptured by the 
homely voices of domestic animals waking to 

[ 71 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


their daily round of wholesome toil, the arrest- 
ing cacophony of negroid tones from out the 
whorling mists through which their owners ap- 
peared and vanished, their grotesque bulks in- 
creased and distorted by the brilliant, shifting 
fogs like those of weird gnomes in some night- 
mare vision of an awful dream. 

And morning always brought sane counsel 
which would be crystallized into determination 
to hold his peace yet a while longer by the 
steaming cup of black coffee served by old Bet 
before he mounted for his early morning round 
of the plantation. Afterward would come the 
bountiful breakfast of birds broiled to a turn or 
sweet fish, fresh from their habitat in the 
treacherous river, served with the crisp, brown 
little corn pones which were one of the black 
woman’s pet specialties, or maybe luscious 
waffles with nectar-like honey rifled from a col- 
ony of industrious bees that dwelt in a village 
of quaint gums in the dim privacy of an Ailan- 
thus grove all their own. 

And when Elise, the mysterious morning 
light of this weird land in her wonderful eyes, 
poured his second coffee and shared the meal, 
the good breakfasts were transformed into 
feasts the gods might envy. 

[ 72 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


On one occasion, as Selby sat alone with the 
old planter in the magic starlight of a spring 
evening, his talk skirted nearer the personal 
than it ever had done. Some episodes in his 
personal history he related to the Colonel, who 
proved a sympathetic listener with a ready un- 
derstanding of the wild impulses of a youngster 
spoiled with too much of the velvet of life and 
an improper or dwarfed conception of its re- 
sponsibilities. 

It was then that Colonel Ravenell tendered 
Selby the position as manager or overseer of 
Little Canes plantation, voicing the wish that it 
were possible to raise sufficient money to repair 
the broken dykes, reclaim the land from the en- 
croaching swamp, restoring the place to its old- 
time glory and productiveness. 

“But that can never be,” he concluded wist- 
fully. “Ravenell is far from being a business 
man and such a burden can never be placed 
upon the shoulders of a woman. Elise has 
wonderful courage and ambition, but this is 
work for the brain and hands of a capable man, 
not those of an old fellow like myself almost 
ready to lay the burden of life aside.” 

Colonel Bavenell was very different from the 
modern-day conception of his cult. He was 


[ 73 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


soldier, student and philosopher, a man noted 
in his day for liberality of thought, erudition 
and abstemious habits of life. Fate had dealt 
him some heavy blows which he had borne 
through the years with the fortitude of a true 
Christian gentleman. Three of his sons had 
been slain in one day at the battle of the Wilder- 
ness, and another, the father of Eavenell and 
Elise, so severely wounded that he could never 
take a man’s place in the affairs of men. This 
son had married, late in life, a distant kins- 
woman, and both he and his frail young wife 
were sleeping the long sleep in the old family 
burying plot among the dim cedars close under 
the rusting rails of the east balcony of the old 
plantation house. 

Shortly after the Civil War Colonel Eavenell, 
then a rich man, had gone to Europe where he 
spent several years in travel and study. He 
had been a close friend of the Vicomte de Les- 
seps who induced him to put the bulk of his 
fortune into the Panama Canal project. When 
that premature undertaking collapsed, he re- 
turned to the Santee, practically a ruined man. 
Labor conditions were at that time an insoluble 
problem; the ancient rice dykes built under the 
lash by semi-huccaneers had melted and dis- 

[ 74 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


solved into mounds of mud, and high tides sub- 
merged the paddies, rendering them unfit for 
cultivation. Colonel Eavenell had no money 
with which to repair the dykes and rebuild the 
trunks, so he let most of the rice go and grew a 
little cotton on the uplands and on some of the 
sandy islands that beaded the outer rim of the 
estate. But they yielded not more than two or 
three hundred bales per season or less, and the 
avid swamp, eager to reclaim its own, was 
steadily encroaching on fields that once yielded 
the finest Sea Island lint. 

This page from his life history Colonel 
Eavenell related to Selby during their evenings 
together ; there were many interesting episodes 
of his career touched upon, but the incident of 
the looted gold was never mentioned between 
thems. It was one of the Colonel’s keenest 
regrets that the knowledge of the treasure had 
ever come to his grandson, for it had, he 
thought, atrophied that young man’s energy, 
making a careless and indolent disposition even 
less efficient for the common business of life, 
and his continuous disappointment in his ina- 
bility to discover the cache souring still further 
a disposition already inclined to acerbity. 

The recovery of the fortune was a con- 

[ 75 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


tingency the Colonel never hoped for ; and while 
he was aware that young Ravenell never ceased 
his search for it, the subject was a dead letter 
between them. 


CHAPTER IX 


S ELBY was ostensibly overlooking the shoe- 
ing of the plantation mules one radiant 
May morning, but in reality his energies 
were concentrated on trying to make head and 
tail of the song bandied between the black far- 
rier and his ape-like helper. 

The melody appeared to be a sort of recita- 
tive or anthem and Selby failed to catch the 
drift for quite a while, partly because the ne- 
gro dialect of the Santee was as yet almost un- 
intelligible to him and partly because the theme 
of the song was interspersed by many queer 
trills and quavers apparently necessary for the 
fitting of the words to the improvised melody. 

The words of the song ran something like 
the following, eliminating the trills and quavers 
among which at times they were quite lost : 

^^Who dat hunt de hoo-doo man, hoo-doo man?’’ 

the farrier’s rich, blithe tenor queried, and the 
helper’s poignant treble answered: 


^^Buckra chile, Buckra chile!” 
[ 77 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Then both voices blended in clear and weird im- 
itation of muted banjo notes, interpolating sev- 
eral bars, when the ape man who had been 
silently working in a nearby paddock broke 
into the music in a deep, heart-moving bass : 

‘^Lordy — my lord! 

Why he want de hoo-doo man, hoo-doo man? 

Lordy — my lord! 

Buckra hunt de sperrit goP 
Lordy — my 1-o-r-d!’^ 

Selby was serenely unconscious of the import 
of this unique vocal performance which ceased 
abruptly as young Eavenell appeared suddenly 
from the rear of the mule sheds. 

“What are those niggers mouthing?” he in- 
quired with unusual interest, joining Selby on 
the paddock fence. 

“Search me,” laughed Selby. “Most of 
their lingo is Sanscrit to my uneducated under- 
standing. I caught only a word or so, ‘sperrit’ 
gold. If that is what you are depending on I 
fear you have a fat chance of finding your for- 
tune. The white lights will be fairly burned 
out before you arrive to replenish them with 
your little cruse of oil,— hey?” 

Eavenell ’s thin face fell suddenly into a 


[ 78 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


scowling mask that wiped from his features all 
traces of its winning effeminacy. 

“These cursed swamp niggers know every- 
thing even before it happens,” he scowled. 
“But the stuff is there somewhere, Buford, 
and that’s no joke; and I’m going to hunt until 
I do find it or am satisfied it can’t be found. 
More, I’m going to use it when I do find it to 
get out of this damn wilderness once and for- 
ever.” 

“Then you figure that the Colonel and Miss 
Elise have no right to a say in the matter?” 
Selby deduced, watching the sullen mask curi- 
ously. 

“Right or no right, they’ll never get it. The 
money came in the first place from the sale of 
slaves brought into the family by grand- 
mother — her portion of great-grandfather’s es- 
tate. Elise can have Little Canes and welcohie. 
I will never dispute her right to it and all she 
can get out of it. But the money is a different 
proposition.” 

Selby, remaining discreetly silent, Ravenell 
hitched closer along the fence, so that the 
darkies dawdling at the forge might not over- 
hear, and continued: 

“I got the nigger. Brought him up this 
[ 79 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


morning. Going to work some of the farthest 
islands tonight. Want to come along, Bu- 
ford?” 

“Well,” consideringly, “I can’t help you 
any, boy, but if my company is not anathema to 
the hoo-doo man and he will kindly refrain 
from casting spells in my direction I’d like to 
see the performance.” 

“All right. Meet me at the pier after sup- 
per. Give Elise the slip. I don’t want any in- 
terference in this business,” and he dropped 
lightly from the fence, strolling leisurely away, 
his inevitable cigarette hanging nervously from 
the corner of his sullen lip. 

Circumstances favored Selby that night. 
Colonel Ravenell was less well than usual and 
Elise went to him early, bidding Selby good- 
night in the dim old hall. He went to his room 
where he smoked several pipes of the planter’s 
excellent tobacco, and when the house became 
quiet made his way softly to the lower floor and 
out through a window of the living room which 
still stood open to the moon-flooded night. 

Prom the open door and windows of the 
kitchen squares of mellow light mingled with 
the whiter radiance of the outer air, negroid 
voices in primitive banter, and cacophonies of 


[ 80 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


inane mirth advertised the fact that the house- 
hold retainers and their numerous hangers-on 
were still at the evening repast and would re- 
main there until, filled to repletion and grown 
weary of singing and laughter, they would 
be overtaken by sleep wherever they sat or 
lounged. 

At the pier Ravenell was waiting to cast off, 
and as Selby stepped aboard he turned the en- 
gine over and they were soon put-putting down 
the river, heading for the open sea. 

For half an hour Ravenell gave his attention 
to rjinning the boat and Selby sat quietly 
astern, smoking and studying with lively curi- 
osity the odd member of the quixotic expedi- 
tion. 

This was the hoo-doo or conjur man on whose 
uncanny powers of divination Ravenell built 
his newest hopes of finding the elusive treasure ; 
and Selby was anxious, from quite another mo- 
tive, to witness the prodigy engaged in his 
devil’s work. 

The little boat worked gallantly out of the 
mouth of the river into the smoother rolls of 
the open sea, heading a course straight for the 
shores of Hog Island. 

“Going to make a thorough job of it this 
[ 81 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


time,” Eavenell announced, stuffing tobacco 
into his pipe and leaning nearer to ignite it 
from the coal of Selby’s cigar. “Hog is the 
farthest out of all the islands belonging to the 
plantation, and I’m going to work in. If this 
yellow devil doesn’t do something this time I’ll 
break his rotten neck.” 

Selby grunted non-committally and the young 
fire-eater ducked into the motor coop, for the 
shores of their destination loomed a faint 
blur on the bosom of the moon-silvered ocean. 
Shortly they were ashore, wading knee-deep in 
the warm swirl of waves that caressed the bar- 
ren rim of the tiny lump of land, startling the 
wild hogs, which scurried for cover with terri- 
fied snorts and great tearing of underbrush. 

Landed, the silent hoo-doo man knelt upon 
the sand, fumbling the contents of a tattered 
fish basket which had been the object of his 
jealous care during the trip to the island. 
From among its mysterious contents he se- 
lected a small object which he held a moment 
between his palms in an attitude of uncanny 
reverence. 

Lurching to his feet, he swung the dangling 
object about his head in a wide circle, muttering 
the while in an unintelligible jargon, then with 
[ 82 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


the object swinging before him, and still mut- 
tering his incantation he started on a swift dog- 
trot along the shore. 

Eavenell followed, though at a respectful dis- 
tance, and Selby, his curiosity partly satisfied, 
lighted his pipe and squatted on the sand to 
wait developments. 

“If the greasy beggar finds anything with his 
crazy spook business he is welcome to it,” he 
thought scornfully. “In this instance finders 
are keepers, at least for the present,” and un- 
der the influence of the good tobacco, the lan- 
guorous murmuring of the lapping waves and 
relaxing caress of the warm sand, he stretched 
himself luxuriously and dozed to sleep. 

The stars were paling in the grey velvet of 
the low-hung sky when Eavenell and the hoo- 
doo man burst out of the brush to the shore 
where Selby slept. The latter rolled over in 
his warm nest, yawning, after one swift glance 
which assured him that the searchers had re- 
turned empty-handed. His faith in the yellow 
man’s powers was nil, yet accidents happen, 
and they might, by some chance, have fallen on 
the hidden cache. 

“Time for the shovel brigade?” he called 
blithely. “No luck on Swine Island — what?” 

[ 83 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“You are mistaken, Buford; the best of 
luck,” Ravenell answered evenly as he passed 
on to the boat where the tools were still stored. 
A pick and a couple of shovels were thrown on 
the shore, and as the moon had long since 
grown weary of illuminating an already too 
brilliant night and had retired, a couple of lan- 
terns were added to the outfit. 

Ravenell lighted the lanterns, handed one to 
Selby and the other to the conjur man who led 
the procession, and in single file they tramped 
away towards the center of the island. 

Selby’s emotions were mixed as he trudged 
in the wake of the flitting figure that piloted 
them straight for the center of the island where 
the thing he knew of lay, and evidently had lain 
so long, keeping guard over the treasure the ir- 
responsible youth before him coveted with such 
hot desire. He was still sceptical of the hoo- 
doo man’s occult powers of discovering any- 
thing hidden from ordinary mortals. He was, 
he declared to Ravenell, from the Ozarks in this 
case, but was perfectly willing to be convinced 
by a demonstration of the conjurer’s boasted 
powers. 

Trudging along in grim silence, they came in 
sight of the kingly tree, the fruit of which Selby 
[ 84 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


had such feeling cause to remember, and the 
leader turned abruptly toward the northern end 
of the island. Selby’s deep breath was one of 
profound relief, with a lively sense of gratitude 
when the mjummer, halting in a small wash, 
placed his lantern upon the ground and waited 
for the white men to approach. 

“Dar!” he exclaimed dramatically in rough 
coast guttural, waving a long arm over the 
ground beneath their feet. “Sperret tell me 
Buckra dig dar!” In tense silence Ravenell 
plunged his pick into the earth and Selby used 
his shovel with good effect. Sweat streamed 
from their faces, backs and arms ached poison- 
ously, and after an hour of grueling toil Selby 
crawled out of the excavation they had made 
and threw himself upon the ground. 

“W-o-o!” he breathed gustily, rubbing his 
blistered palms tenderly. ‘ ‘ This is too near kin 
to day labor! If there is a treasure between 
here and China I cheerfully donate, bequeath 
and subscribe to anybody that wants it, my 
share, ’ ’ and he leisurely proceeded to tamp and 
light his pipe, rolling over on the sand to ease 
the aching muscles of his back. 

Seizing Selby’s shovel the hoo-doo man was 
about to descend into the pit when Ravenell ’s 
[ 85 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


pick rung resoundingly against some substance 
other than natural rock. It was a tense mo- 
ment, Ravenell pausing with upraised imple- 
ment, Selby, electrified to keenly surprised in- 
terest, peering into the pit, and the black man 
staring with bulged eyes and bowed knees, in 
the act of reaching for a shovelful of sand. 

Ravenell swung his pick and again it rung 
with a clear whine on the metallic object hidden 
in the earth. A whistling sigh from the hoo- 
doo man drew Selby’s glance just at the right 
instant to prevent him bringing the shovel down 
in what was intended for a murderous blow 
upon the head and back of the unsuspecting 
youth in the pit. 

In the same instant Selby’s muscles tensed, 
he took a flying leap which landed him in the 
right position to plant his famous upper cut 
beneath the ear of the hoo-doo man, who gave 
a raucous grunt at the impact of the doubled 
fist against his bull neck, and promptly folded 
up into a heap, as limp and quite as dejected 
looking as a dead hen. 

Both white men stood a moment regarding 
the inert mass of viciousness that represented 
the intangible, incomprehensible, uncanny mys- 
tery of African superstition that seethes like 

[ 86 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


a submerged wave under the fabric of the whole 
black race beneath the thin veneer of civ- 
ilization superimposed by generations of life 
under the white man and his silly law. Then 
Ravenell made a quick motion toward the 
vicious knife which always companioned him 
and which now peeped from the leg of his heavy 
cowhide boot. 

“No — no, boy!” and Selby caught the hand 
which grasped the murderous weapon. “He 
will be quiet enough until we finish investigat- 
ing the seven wonders of this man-sized hole 
we have here. I distinctly heard the same 
‘chink’ that excited our wonder friend. But 
perhaps we’d better take a couple of half 
hitches around the beggar in case he wakes up 
and fancies taking another crack at us with a 
convenient shovel. Anything like a rope in the 
cutter?” 

Eavenell hurried away for the rope and Selby 
took a seat upon the chest of the inanimate 
form of the hoo-doo man, who was beginning to 
show signs of returning consciousness when the 
boy reappeared with a length of cotton line. 
They tied the hands and feet of the groaning 
hoo-doo man and threw him aside on the sand. 

“Now let’s see what’s here,” Selby re- 

ts?] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


marked, dropping into the hole. Ravenell fol- 
lowed, and for several moments both adven- 
turers shoveled furiously in grim silence. 

Under the vigorous working of the combined 
tools the obstruction which chinked so merrily 
and deceptively against the pick was unearthed 
and proved to be nothing more valuable than 
some rusted and corroded portions of ancient 
ship furnishings, lengths of hand-forged chain 
and other worthless curios of a bygone and for- 
gotten time. 

The hole was quite empty of its disappointing 
contents and the pinks and gold of the southern 
dawn were painting the floor of the ocean when 
the men threw their shovels out of the trench 
and followed after, both of them dog-weary, 
and one of them sore and disheartened by the 
further vanishing of his dearest, much-cher- 
ished illusion. 

Forcing the hoo-doo man, who was fully re- 
covered from Selby’s knock-out blow, before 
them, they marched to the beach and climbed 
aboard the launch. In grim silence Ravenell 
started the engine and headed through the oily 
swells for the mainland. 

Selby’s feelings were mixed as he watched 
the silent youth put the launch through the 

[ 88 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


sirtooth sea, and his heart twinged with a sort 
of paternal sympathy for the acrid disappoint- 
ment that gnawed at the undisciplined young 
soul. 

Behind them, corroding in the sand of Hog 
Island, lay that which would alford Ravenell a 
glimpse of what the lad’s feverish fancy con- 
ceived as the ultimate happiness, but which, out 
of his larger experience, Selby well knew would 
only he a letting down of the bars to a state 
which was the direct antithesis of what he an- 
ticipated. 

But at that, were it not for the tall, grey-eyed 
girl who had come to mean so much to him, and 
to whom he felt he might always be the least of 
those who held a place in the sun of her regard, 
he would turn the launch again to the island 
and point out the treasure he knew lay waiting 
for the turn of the wheel of fate that would 
start it again on its mission of good and ill 
among the sons and daughters of men. 

They were approaching the mainland when 
both white men woke simultaneously from the 
preoccupation which held them and turned to 
look at the hoo-doo man who during the trip lay 
in a sulky huddle in the stern of the launch. 
He was no longer there, at least in his corporeal 
[ 89 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


yellow body. Nothing but the short length of 
cotton rope with which E-avenell had so 
viciously but insecurely tied his hands and feet 
lay upon the bottom of the boat. 

“Grone overboard,” Eavenell announced in- 
differently. “These coast niggers swim like 
eels. Bet he beats the launch to Little Canes 


now. 


CHAPTER X 


W HEN the hoo-doo man slipped his 
bonds and slid over the side of the 
launch neither himself nor his evil 
influence were eliminated from Little Canes 
and its neighborhood. A swim of ten miles or 
more in the warm waters of a summer sea was 
a matter of mere diversion to a man, white or 
black, born and reared on the coastal islands or 
in the Santee country, where the highways are 
mostly waterways and swimming, or a boat of 
some description, the logical means of trans- 
portation. 

The hoo-doo man loitered and disported him- 
self in the water or swam leisurely toward the 
shore, as the humor seized him, and, as Ravenell 
predicted, reached the mainland very shortly 
after his jailors made their landing. 

To the eye and ken of the “Buckra” of 
the plantation he remained invisible, sleeping 
through the languid hours of daylight when the 
denizens of the place were about their work, but, 
like the other strange and uncanny lives which 
wake and have their activities only in darkness. 


[ 91 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


he was astir and busy in the hours between dark 
and daylight. 

The chopping season was on in the cotton 
fields and the serried ranks of corn needed 
every hoe that could be mustered to conquer the 
grass that always sprung anew through the 
dank nights of the growing weather in the moist 
swamp country. The morning following the 
abortive treasure hunt on Hog Island Selby 
was out at an unusually early hour to see the 
hands started in good time. 

But when he arrived at the scene of the day’s 
labor not a negro showed over all the broad ex- 
panse of cotton row or corn furrow. Puzzled 
at this state of affairs he consulted Colonel 
Ravenell’s watch which he carried and waited 
a half hour longer. He knew the dilatory habits 
of the field workers and spent the time in care- 
less expectancy, but when the sun crept steadily 
higher above the black smear of swamp on the 
far horizon and the morning silence was still 
unbroken by negroid voices he realized some- 
thing unusual was happening, and rode hastily 
back to the mule pens. 

Only a few of the half-nude men loitered 
about, the pens wearing an air of languid 
Sabbath lonesomeness, the ungroomed mules 

[ 92 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


drooping dejectedly around the water troughs 
after the manner of these animals in their hours 
of idleness. 

Elise, mounted on Firefly, rode up as Selby 
arrived, her face unusually pale, and lurking in 
her grey eyes was the shadow of unfamiliar 
trouble. But she smiled bravely, her brilliant, 
flashing smile and motioned Selby to join her 
out of hearing of the men at the pens. 

‘ ‘ Here ’s a mess, ’ ’ she said impatiently as 
Selby cantered to her side. “Some nigger 
from outside has organized what he calls a 
strike among the hands, and this morning none 
of them will go to work until his demands are 
satisfled. Can you imagine anything more ag- 
gravating and ridiculous?” 

“Tell me more about it,” Selby demanded. 
“Have you seen the trouble-maker?” 

“No, but Creasy says he is a hoo-doo man 
held very much in awe by his race for the mys- 
terious power he claims and the uncanny traffic 
with the dead they think he carries on. You’d 
be surprised to hear of the things they do and 
believe here in the Santee. All the blacks and 
most of the whites born and reared here believe 
queer things,” she explained in answer to Sel- 
by’s snort and grin of cynicism. 

[ 93 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Selby wheeled his horse. With this insight 
into the affair the thing which menaced the wel- 
fare of the girl he loved ceased to be a menace 
and became a joke. The line of his jaw and 
chin became just a trifle hard-bitten and his 
eyes narrowed in a curious imitation of the old 
“Iron” King’s as he rode back to the mule pens 
confident of being able to handle the affair with 
the tact and discretion the situation denianded, 
though the black man was an enigma to his mat- 
ter-of-fact understanding, and the workings of 
the black man ’s mind a tortuous and secret way. 

“It is rather a critical situation, Miss Raven- 
ell, but there is no immediate cause for worry. 
I will go back and see what is to be done with 
the beggars.” 

“Whatever is done were best done with a 
length of rope and a mule whip,” she said 
viciously. Selby’s quick glance was one of sur- 
prise at that brutality on the lips of the sweet 
and gentle girl, but as they neared the mule 
pens she rode on to the stables, leaving Selby 
to parley with the men alone. 

“I understand,” he said, halting near them 
and speaking pleasantly, “that there is some 
dissatisfaction among the men. Better talk it 
over and get it out of your systems. Now, 

[ 94 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Scarney,” addressing the boss of the plough- 
men with encouraging geniality, “say your 
little piece and let us hear how it listens.” 

Scarney laughed loud and boisterously, as is 
the custom of the black brother when embar- 
rassed with unaccustomed attentions or unfore- 
seen circumstances, shuffled his bare splay feet 
in the hot sand and twisted his old hat into 
a limp rope between his ham-like hands. 
Clearly the proposition he was about to voice 
was not the result of his own thought and rea- 
soning, and he put it forth much as a very dif- 
fident child delivers a sentence learned by rote, 
the significance of which he is ingenuously and 
bleakly ignorant. 

“Huccome,” he queried, looking about at his 
studiously uninterested companions for at least 
the moral support afforded by curiosity, “huc- 
come Buckra man all tarn got plenty an’ swamp 
man all tarn got work to ’sport he?” 

Selby regarded the swamp man curiously 
from his seat on his splendid horse. 

“To translate into civilized vernacular you 
mean ‘ How is it the white man always seems to 
have money to carry out his plans and desires 
and the black man has to work always for the 


[ 95 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


pittance it requires to feed him?’ Is that the 
nub of the question?” 

“Yassir, boss, yassir. Dat him!” Scarney 
agreed, eager to escape from a situation which 
was none of his planning and from which he 
longed to beat a swift and safe retreat. 

Selby regarded him a moment as though 
pondering the idea, then said slowly, with ju- 
dicial emphasis : 

‘ ‘ That, swamp man, is a problem milled over 
for a greater period of time than your intel- 
lectual vacuum can conceive, and to no effect by 
brainier heads than mine. I have never cogi- 
tated profoundly on any of the questions of 
social or any other ’ism. They do not appeal 
to me, having never run counter to anything in 
my scheme of things. But the question before 
us now is the working of the cotton, corn and 
rice crops of Little Canes plantation. Your wel- 
fare as well as that of the maligned Buckra is 
indissolubly bound up with its prosperity or 
the alternative. The wisest thing to do in this 
and similar crisis is to arbitrate the question. 
What do you say, black men, to an arbitra- 
tion?” 

Selby’s fluent flood of perfectly, to them, in- 
comprehensible language dazed the guileless 

[ 96 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


understanding of the blacks. They heard the 
word sounds but the substance passed their 
consciousness as the syllables of a foreign 
tongue pass the understanding of the uniniti- 
ate. They were silent, gazing with popped eyes 
and dropped jowls at the genial, serene Buckra 
on the big horse. “Arbitration” might mean 
anything from fifty lashes with a mule whip to 
a fish fry on the coast, and Scarney, wishing 
himself well out of a business which promised 
such complications as the fearful word implied, 
ducked his head, scraped his feet with the ges- 
ture indicative of the swamp man’s submission, 
and joyfully agreed to the proposition. 

“Yassir, boss. Yassir! We-all ab-trate. 
Yassir !” 

“Very well,” Selby agreed quietly, “but this 
is not the time. Arbitration, to be effective, 
must be done in the dark of the moon. You all 
know that. Now,” impressively, “ring the 
bell, put in the stock and get to work. Too 
much time has been wasted already.” 

More bowing and scraping and joyful assent, 
and the entire field gang, appearing magically 
from various vantage points of ambush in 
which they lurked with mixed feelings of curi- 
osity and fear, were energetically harnessing 

[ 97 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


and hooking the inditferent mules and were 
away to the fields, the whole incomprehensible 
incident closed and, as far as they were con- 
cerned, speedily to be forgotten in the new and 
more interesting incidents of another day. 


CHAPTER XI 


O NE evening, shortly after the abortive 
treasure hunt on Hog Island, Selby re- 
turned to the plantation house some- 
what later than usual, and when he off-saddled 
and led his horse to the lot was given something 
of a mental jolt by the discovery of a pair of 
very classy saddle animals stripped of their 
gear and making themselves very much at home 
with the pile of forage put out for the evening 
repast of the plantation mules. 

These animals had the appearance of having 
been ridden long but carefully, for their glossy 
hides, still damp from the sweat of the journey, 
showed that they had been subject to a very 
thorough rubbing down. 

Finding these strange animals in the mule 
pens gave Selby food for anxious thought. 
Where did they come from and what might 
their riders’ business at Little Canes be, were 
questions which flashed across his seething 
mind, but to which he could formulate no inno- 
cent or commonplace cause as a probable an- 
swer; for never before, since his advent at the 
plantation, had visitors arrived on horseback. 
[ 99 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Neighbors who were frequent callers and 
those who honored the family with visits ar- 
rived and departed in bateaux through the 
water lanes of the rice paddies. All these were 
commonplace enough; friends of the Colonel’s 
own age who broke their journey “out” and 
“into” the Santee by a day or frequently a 
week’s rest at Little Canes. The water lanes 
took them as they brought them, their advent 
or departure making no change in the life of 
the plantation. 

The broad hall was silent and filled with 
twilight shadows when Selby crossed it on the 
way to his room. All the tall white doors to the 
chambers on the upper corridor were noncom- 
mittally closed, and Selby shut his own also 
very softly and stood leaning against it, re- 
garding with unseeing eyes the familiar things 
of the shadowy interior. 

Upon the white bed was spread a suit of spot- 
less linen, the conventional summer evening rai- 
ment of gentlemen in the Santee, with silk shirt 
and immaculate white shoes near at hand. 
Evidently the intruders would he guests for 
dinner and old Absalom had forgotten nothing, 
for a pitcher of hot shaving water steamed un- 

[ 100 ] 


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der a towel on the washstand and his razor lay 
ready honed to hand. 

Well, Selby decided cynically, he would use 
the articles, and whatever situation lurked be- 
low he would meet it groomed and arrayed as 
properly became a gentleman. 

He was well along with his toilet when 
Ravenell’s sharp rat-a-tat on his door startled 
his chaotic train of thought, and that young 
man thrust himself into the room, lank nether 
limbs encased in sharply creased white linen, a 
military hair brush clenched in each hand. 

“Hah, Buford! Didn’t hear you come in,” 
he said, vigorously smoothing an already 
glassy scalp. 

“No? Nobody about,” Selby answered 
through the shaven side of his lips. “Why the 
state regalia?” 

“Some fellows dining, and after that a little 
private matter between ourselves that has to 
do with deporting a certain hoo-doo man from 
these parts. I brought him in, damn him, and 
now I will have to get him out. He is demoral- 
izing the whole nigger population of the place 
with some fool rot about a labor union. He has 
gathered about every greasy coin in the Santee 
as ‘society dues,’ and has promised the hands 

[ 101 ] 


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fifty per cent raise with a fifty rake-off for him- 
self as grand organizer of the works. Nothing 
short about that bird, huh!” and Bavenell vig- 
orously and profanely consigned the trouble- 
some hoo-doo man to that region a certain gen- 
eral said was another name for war. 

Selby chuckled in wicked appreciation of 
Ravenell’s ireful disillusion. “How have the 
mighty fallen,” he observed softly through the 
foam of lather he was painstakingly scraping 
from chin and jaw. “But is it not a question 
of first catch your hare ? ’ ’ 

“Exactly, hence Tolletson and Cullom, the 
two birds below. That yellow devil is a slick 
proposition and it will take the four of us to 
nail him,” and Ravenell proceeded to outline 
his plan to catch the hoo-doo man and forcibly 
eject him from the Santee, where his presence 
was threatening to become a menace among his 
race, as it had already proved to be a pest to 
their masters. “After dinner, when the play 
with Elise is over, come to the pier,” he said. 
“Tolletson and Cullom understand. We may 
get him tonight and it may take a week, so come 
prepared, for we’re going to get him.” 

His toilet completed and his fears allayed, 
Selby went below to pay his evening respects 
[ 102 ] 


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to the Colonel and make his daily report of 
work done that day. Visiting familiarly with 
the invalid master of Little Canes he found the 
riders of the thoroughbreds as much at home 
with a syphon and a bottle of whiskey as their 
animals were with the abundant forage in the 
mule pens. 

Both favored Selby with that keen, stripping 
‘ ‘ once over ’ ’ men on every plane of society, es- 
pecially those who have served their novitiate 
to the larger world, are prone to give an inter- 
loper falling from the blue into their close cir- 
cle. The glances were masked in this instance 
by cordial handclasps and courteous verbal 
welcome into the monotony of life in the Santee. 

Like the Ravenells, these men instantly recog- 
nized in Selby that intangible, unmistakable 
bond of caste, and as there were numerous cir- 
cumstances and conditions in the lives of many 
of the dwellers in this weird, semi-barbarous 
swamp country that could ill bear the close 
scrutiny of the conventional world, they ac- 
cepted him at his face value of a cultivated, dis- 
cerning man of their own cult, with whose 
personal history and private preference they 
had no concern. 

Dinner was a leisurely affair served in a 
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quaint little room off the chamber occupied by 
Colonel Ravenell, and the high white paneled 
doors were folded hack to include the invalid on 
his chaise-lounge in the party. 

This room, always a marvel and delight to 
Selby, was a charming bit of old-world magnifi- 
cence tucked away in the corner of the great 
mouldering mansion. The hand which had 
vandalized the state rooms and the great halls 
had paused here, leaving the room intact in all 
its olden suggestive splendor of gilded consoles, 
high mirrors and spindle-legged furniture. 
Only the men in their easy white linen, the for- 
mal summer evening dress of the Santee, struck 
a modern note. 

Elise herself was strangely different tonight. 
There were subtile, mysterious things about 
her that he did not understand. They were 
veiled in her grey eyes that burned shadowy 
and dark, and there was a certain underlying, 
indefinable coquetry about her seemingly sim- 
ple dress which fell in pretty, changing folds 
with every movement that she made. And 
when Absalom, the ancient servitor, had dod- 
dered away with the dinner service and she sat 
before the yellow-toothed old spinet tinkling 
inane wails of heart-crushed damsels for devil- 


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ishly irresistible young sparks who had loved 
and ridden away, that camouflaged as popular 
“airs” in that dim period when the room and 
its furnishings were young, the illusion of back- 
ward turning time was complete. 

Selby sat in the purple shadow cast by the 
fluttering light of the many-branched candela- 
bra intently studying the peculiar personality 
introduced as Tolletson, and who offered un- 
deniable points. This man was tall without 
giving the impression of height, and the un- 
usual width of his shoulders was masked by the 
slope that seemed to run almost to his ears. 
His unmistakably English countenance pos- 
sessed a genial homeliness that achieved a dis- 
tinction seldom attained by the perfection of 
manly pulchritude. He had, too, a pair of the 
clearest blue-grey eyes Selby had ever seen, 
which he fixed unwaveringly upon Elise, as she 
sang, with a steady stare that would have been 
rudely disconcerting were it not offset by the 
unmistakable something that bespoke ancestry 
and good breeding. 

Selby speculated curiously, as he studied the 
unique personality, on his antecedents and the 
motives which prompted him to bury himself in 
the Santee, and grew almost sullenly jealous at 

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what he fancied he saw flickering in the limpid 
gaze that never wavered from the charming 
countenance of the young mistress of Little 
Canes. 

Cullom, the other guest, a young fellow of 
Ravenell’s age, who had done more than strict 
justice to the very excellent dinner, was slightly 
bored with the quality and theme of Miss 
Ravenell’s music, and had the forethought to 
dispose his angular length of limbs in as com- 
fortable an attitude as the state chairs, mis- 
named easy, would allow, and dozed through 
the performance, but who, at a covert signal 
from Ravenell, hanging restlessly on the out- 
skirts of the party, the inevitable cigarette 
dangling unlighted from his petulant lip, was 
wide-eyed and eager for the night’s adventure. 

Ten minutes after the mirrored door had 
closed on the good-nights of the men their white 
linen was shucked and they were on the pier in 
rough hunting garb ready to engage in the 
quest for the most elusive quarry that ever 
bafiled hunter, the black man who is hunted and 
entertains no desire to be caught. 

Two well-provisioned bateaux rocked silently 
on the black wash of the river. Ravenell and 
Cullom dropped into one, Selby and Tolletson 

[ 106 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


into the other. Cullom, sat in the stern of the 
forward boat nursing between his knees a brace 
of red-eyed, damp-mouthed, bench-legged blood- 
hounds, and old Duchess, the frightful-visaged, 
gentle-hearted dam of the Little Canes pack, 
nestled contentedly at Selby’s feet. 

Ravenell and Tolletson took up the paddles, 
and with scarcely a ripple of the water shot for- 
ward down the stream. No wraith of moon- 
beam lighted the black rush of the river’s 
waves, and the dense willows and bays almost 
meeting and mingling overhead shut out the 
faint sidereal glow of the semi-clouded sky. 

Shortly Selby and Tolletson lost the boat 
ahead in a denser murk of close-growing foli- 
age, and soon Tolletson paddled into the mouth 
of one of the wider water lanes and edged the 
boat close to the bank, holding it stationary 
with the paddle thrust into the soft ooze of the 
bottom. 

“Gad!” breathed Tolletson after a short 
period of thick silence. “ I ’d give something for 
a smoke. ’ ’ 

Selby’s smothered grunt was sympathetic, 
and after a few moments a soft gurgle followed 
by a satisfied sigh reached his ears and some- 

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SPIRIT GOLD 


thing cool and smooth was thrust against his 
hand. 

“Have a nip, anyhow,” came in a raucous 
whisper from the Englishman’s end of the boat. 
“Beastly business this, waiting, hah?” 

Selby’s fingers closed around the object, 
touching the moist hand of Tolletson in the 
dark. He held the fiask idly between his palms 
for a moment, but did not care to drink. For 
no other reason than because of that which he 
fancied he read in the cool, light eyes of the 
man when they rested on the singing girl he dis- 
liked him, and that antipathy extended even to 
his pocket flask and the brandy which it con- 
tained. 

He returned the flask with a muttered word 
of thanks and they sat silent for what seemed 
an interminable time, listening to the sibilant 
rush of water, the dulcet voices of night birds 
and the booming and tinkling symphonies of 
millions of swamp frogs, as unceasing and 
monotonous as the gurgling wash of the turbu- 
lent streamj. 

Selby did not know what his companion in 
the murk was doing, but his own thoughts were 
racked with speculations regarding Tolletson. 
Where did he come from, and for what reason 

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SPIRIT GOLD 


did he immure himself in the Santee, and for 
how long had he enjoyed the cordial run of the 
plantation house ? Could he but be certain that 
his fancied rival was no freer in honor to ap- 
proach Elise than himself his presence there 
would be in a measure bearable. 

Selby thought he could read in his counte- 
nance Tolletson’s feelings for Miss Ravenell, 
but when he sought to speculate on the probable 
place the Englishman held in her regard his 
mind withdrew abashed from the thought, for 
what right had he, the killer of another man, to 
thrust his speculations upon the holy privacy of 
a young girl’s feelings? 

Selby was startled from his bitter reverie by 
the plopping dip of a paddle in the water. 
Someone was hurrying down the water lane, 
using more haste than caution, for he seemed 
very careless of the noise his blade made in the 
stream. Tolletson hastily withdrew his paddle 
from the mud and stood prepared, but when the 
careless boatman drew alongside the faint star- 
light was obscured by a drifting cloud, and the 
bulk of the bateau and its occupant could not 
be distinguished from the general murk. 

Just then the dip of another paddle sounded 

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SPIRIT GOLD 


up the lane and Eavenell’s voice hailed them 
through the night. 

“Hah, Buford! Tolletson! Cut him off! 
After him or he will take to the rice !” 

Tolletson swung his bateau into the lane, 
threw himself on his knees and sent the shell 
skimming forward. Eavenell pressed him 
closely, and both clumsy craft flew with the 
speed of the wind down the swift water lane 
that emptied itself a short distance ahead into 
the boiling river. 

Just as both bateaux reached their maximum 
speed Eavenell’s fears were realized. The 
fugitive hoo-doo man abandoned his boat in one 
wild jump that landed him asprawl in the out- 
skirts of a flooded rice paddy. The abandoned 
bateau sped forward a space under its own 
momentum, but the guidance of the paddle re- 
moved, it began to wash from side to side in the 
lane and spin menacingly in the swift current. 

Selby shouted a warning, hut too late to he of 
avail to the craft in the rear. They were near 
enough to the mouth of the water lane to get the 
full backwash of the river, augmented at this 
hour by the tides rolling in from the sea. Tol- 
letson ’s flying bateau rammed that of the hoo- 
doo man which was thrashing wildly about in 


[ 110 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


the counter currents and swiftly up-ended, toss- 
ing Tolletson, Selby and the old bloodhound 
into the boiling waves. Eavenell’s bateau in 
turn crashed into the others, spinning madly to- 
gether in the currents, sending him, Cullom and 
the brace of dogs to join Tolletson, Selby and 
the Duchess in the water. 

For a few seconds it was every man for him- 
self in a desperate scramble for the shore. 
Selby, Cullom and the dogs landed safely, Tol- 
letson and Ravenell remained in the water, 
struggling to capture one of the crazily gyrat- 
ing boats. Tolletson still retained his paddle 
and finally succeeded in righting one of the 
bateaux and pushed it up into the rice. 

Cullom did not linger to learn the outcome of 
the impromptu ducking of his friends. Giving 
the dogs the scent, he was away on the trail of 
the fugitive before the boat was well grounded. 
The others soon followed, beating the rice, 
scrambling and wading knee-deep in water hol- 
lows until they shortly came to the quarry at 
bay, frantically defending himself from the 
fangs of the excited hounds. 

They bound him securely this time, with rope 
Ravenell wore round his waist for the purpose, 
and the party trailed back through the wet rice 

[ 111 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


to the boat. Here they discovered the flying 
negro had taken no precaution in plunging 
through the flooded rice and had, in one of his 
mad leaps, landed on or near a vicious rattler, 
and the peeved serpent had resented the intru- 
sion into his domain by promptly sinking his 
fangs into one of the negro’s bare calves. 

Tolletson promptly administered first aid 
from his pocket flask, but as provisions and 
remedies were at the bottom of the water lane 
no more could be done. 

The coming day was faintly painting the hor- 
izon above the line of the swamp when the be- 
draggled party reached the launch and thrust 
the groaning hoo-doo man aboard. They were 
followed by Eavenell, who declined the company 
of any of the party. Everything was ready ; he 
started his engine and headed for Georgetown 
and the open sea. 

Day had fully come when Selby, after help- 
ing Tolletson and Cullom to saddle and seeing 
them ride away, crept up to his room to bathe 
away the signs of the night’s adventure and 
make himself presentable for a hoped-for meet- 
ing with Elise at early breakfast. 


[ 112 ] 


CHAPTER XII 


S ELBY’S hopes were not realized on this 
morning; after his strenuous night in the 
rice lanes. He found the dining room 
silent and deserted, the great shining expanse 
of mahogany bare except for his own plate laid 
on a napkin at one side. 

Creasy, Elise’s own maid, came from the 
kitchen with his breakfast tray, and his cheer- 
ful observation of “Well, Creasy, looks like I’d 
have to eat all the breakfast myself this morn- 
ing,” cunningly devised to draw from her the 
probable whereabouts of her mistress, netted 
him nothing, for the coast damsel only mut- 
tered something in her own outlandish dialect 
which he did not understand, and which it was 
just as well did not penetrate his understand- 
ing, for Creasy harbored something more than 
a shrewd suspicion that the machinations of 
the young Buckra had to do with the failure of 
a certain gay yellow hoo-doo man to keep tryst 
with her the preceding night, and her feelings 
toward all the Buckra were anything but mel- 
low this morning. 


[ 113 ] 


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Placing his breakfast on the table and pour- 
ing his coffee in thick silence and with much dis- 
patch, she turned with the air of an exasperated 
goddess and left him alone, her bare splay feet 
smacking the floor with venomous energy. 

Selby lingered over his lonely meal, but no 
footfall broke the morning silence of the great 
dim room, and when there were no more edibles 
to claim his distrait attention he went out 
through the silent hall to the stables where he 
pottered unnecessarily over saddle girth and 
twisted bit, subconsciously hoping to see Elise 
in trim linen riding clothes run dowu the broad 
steps, volunteering her company for a part of 
the morning ride. 

But the capricious brown mare munched her 
corn and disdainfully nosed her saltgrass hay 
undisturbed in her box stall, for the black boy, 
whose only duty in life, other than gormandiz- 
ing on the kitchen step and slumbering in 
sweaty, fly-tormented beatitude when his 
capacity was oversatisfied, seemed to be the dry 
nursing of this exotic bit of horseflesh, was no- 
where to be seen. 

The blinds on the Colonel’s windows were 
tightly drawn, and the windows above, her 
windows, while wide open to any vagrant 

[ 114 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


breeze, were still guarded by the flowered 
draperies that hung limply before them. 

Selby mounted at last and rode slowly past 
the house with eyes studiously averted from the 
compelling windows, and was presently swal- 
lowed in the dense wall of wraithy mist that 
rose thick as white smoke from river and 
marshland. So tangible and impenetrable was 
this mist wall that Selby halted his horse sud- 
denly at a sound near him with which he had 
come to be familiar. This peculiar thrashing 
noise made by the rattle of dry canes against 
the trodden earth always preceded a pedestrian 
in the Santee, and someone in the mist was 
beating the path before them to clear it of 
loitering snakes. 

Selby waited in half-incredulous expectancy, 
and presently the unwieldy bulk of the Little 
Canes chief cook loomed in sight, her bundle 
of thrashing canes in one hand, a huge string of 
silvery glistening fish fresh from the river in 
the other. 

Her skirts were trussed high above her calves 
to protect them from the heavy deposits of 
moisture that soaked grass and weeds; her 
curved black legs and uncompromisingly flat 
feet were bare and calloused. She was the 


[ 115 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Santee, incomprehensible, grotesque, as she 
bobbed her curtsey to the Buckra and grinned 
her inscrutable toothless grin there on the mist- 
banked path. 

“Fresh fish for breakfast? Good!” Selby 
pleasantly answered her fiood of coast dialect, 
then the mist swallowed her as she trudged 
houseward, shouting backward a sentence 
which she evidently wished impressed upon his 
mind. 

The news which she thought she had imparted 
to him was the fact that the annual fish fry 
which always took place at this season was due 
on the morrow, and the household darkies along 
with their betters would have high holiday and 
feast to repletion on delicacies among which 
fish was by no means the major portion. 

Selby, serenely unconscious of the joyous 
news the old dame thought she had imparted, 
rode on to the fields preoccupied with his un- 
happy reflections. Today he had no relish for 
work. The sun burned, his pipe palled; old 
memories and ghosts of things and deeds that 
for weeks lay dormant in his consciousness 
swarmed through his thoughts and he could 
but chew the cud of bitter regrets, that the cas- 

[ 116 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


ual appearance of a man of his own sort 
aroused. 

The west portico was the favorite retreat of 
the young mistress of Little Canes whenever 
she wished to he alone with her work or her 
thoughts. Here her favorite flowers grew in 
pots and boxes along the edge of the floor, and 
there had also been an abortive attempt to quell 
the riot of weeds upon the terraces. It was a 
silent, secluded spot. On this western side of 
the old mansion were the once state apart- 
ments, lofty ceilinged, mahogany paneled, 
tapestried and fllled with costly furnishings in 
the days when Little Canes was a hospitable 
home of wealth and culture. 

These rooms were closed long since, stripped 
of their treasures and given over to the disin- 
tegrating tooth of time, filled with haunting 
stillness, where splendor had turned to mould, 
where time had effaced form and faded color, 
where only the shadowy film of texture still 
remained, and where even that was slowly 
yielding under the silent wear of Time’s re- 
lentless mercenaries — moths and dust and rust. 

Eain trickled through the broken roof, effac- 
ing the richly painted walls, and bats and wrens 
built, season after season, among the frescoes 

[ 117 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


and along the cornices, and even the branches 
of the ornate chandeliers were laden with twigs 
and straws stored there by industrious house- 
building birds. 

The silence was broken here only by the chat- 
tering of wrens and house sparrows fighting 
for precedence through rifts in the broken 
blinds and Elise did not hear Selby’s approach 
until he seated himself at her feet upon the 
portico floor, his feet among the flowers, his 
back against one of the huge, dingy, fluted 
columns. 

Countess, the superannuated old collie, came 
to her favorite place at his knee, beseeching 
with her soft human eyes his accustomed ca- 
ress. Selby fondled the delicate tulip ears of 
the dog as he talked to the girl in the old rustic 
chair. 

Colonel Eavenell was still confined to his 
room or to his chaise-lounge on the piazza 
opening upon it. In the months following Sel- 
by’s coming to Little Canes he had passed by 
imperceptible stages from a man, old and worn 
with stress and disappointments of life, in- 
capacitated with a period of illness, to that of 
chronic invalidism, and at times he seemed to 
Selby’s keener vision as one flushed with the 

[ 118 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


gentle afterglow of that second infancy which 
comes before the night. 

Elise may have sensed something of this con- 
dition, for she kept from him all disquieting 
knowledge of affairs on the plantation, and 
Selby’s nightly reports were made with punc- 
tilious regularity and respect. 

“How are things going among the strikers?’’ 
Elise asked, leaning near to Selby and speaking 
in a low voice. 

“Fine,” he reported carelessly, stroking the 
old collie’s brown head. “I think we have 
heard the last of the matter, at least for this 
time.” 

“Why — ? How?” Elise regarded him doubt- 
fully, puckering an anxious brow. 

‘ ‘ Oh, Countess, we know there are more ways 
to kill a cat besides choking him with hot but- 
ter,” laughed Selby, taking the dog’s fine head 
between his hands and gazing into her pathetic 
eyes. 

“Yes. But Countess doesn’t kill cats. Mr. 
Buford, I want to know.” 

“Well, if you must have the plain, unvar- 
nished tale, the cause and head of the rumpus is 
now on the high seas somewhere between the 
river’s mouth and the little city of Georgetown 


[ 119 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


under the safe conduct of one determined white 
man, alias your brother Ravenell. He is being 
deported in the high-handed manner character- 
istic of the Buckra man in the Santee, which 
place I think will not appeal to him as a safe 
and happy hunting ground for some time to 
come.” 

“Still — I don’t understand.” 

“Oh, we simply used a little diplomacy, a 
mite of gentle urgency in eliminating the root 
of the trouble. No violence was used, I assure 
you. Miss Ravenell,” and Selby gave her a mi- 
nute and circumstantial account of the night’s 
adventure with much humorous comment of his 
own. 

“That is the first time I ever assisted at a 
man hunt,” he said, “and for a time the excite- 
ment promised something great. But with the 
intervention of the rattler and the douse of cold 
swamp water most of the vim was washed from 
the affair. The beggar lay down before we 
had a fair start.” 

Elise laughed as much with relief as amuse- 
ment at Selby’s quaint method of quelling a 
strike. 

“I never would have thought of that way,” 
she said, “but I’m certainly glad you happened 

[ 120 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


to, and I hope grandfather will be well enough 
to ’tend to the hiring before it is time to do so 
again. I hardly know what I’d done without 
you, Mr. Buford, in the present case.” 

“Don’t wish it on me. Miss Eavenell,” begged 
Selby lazily, toying with the collie’s ears. 
“It was a pleasure to best the yellow devil, but 
the scheme was your brother Eavenell ’s. But 
seriously, I hate to think of you struggling with 
this horde of potential trouble with only a 
feeble old man for protection. ’ ’ 

“There is nothing to fear,” she answered 
with superb indifference. “There are always 
petty periodical risings, and in old times slave 
insurrections, but they were nipped in the bud, 
generally. But this free labor is the most try- 
ing problem. There is freer traffic in and out of 
the Santee these days, and the swamp people 
are not so submissive. But I love the work, 
and if we were not so poor the life would be 
ideal to me. We could entertain and surround 
ourselves with something of the old life, and go 
into the world from time to time. I have lots 
of friends in the North, but very few I’m not 
ashamed to ask to visit me here, and I decline 
all invitations myself, because I’ve nothing to 
wear and no money to spend. I ought to have 


[ 121 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


more pride than to tell you all this, but you 
can’t help seeing, by this time, how poor we 
really are. 

‘ ‘ This place is mortgaged, and we ’ve already 
borrowed all we can get on the cotton crop — it 
is the way every season. This is really a rice 
plantation, and has a thousand acres of splen- 
did rice lands which have lain fallow for years 
and would yield magnificently if we had the 
money to work it. It would take twenty or 
thirty thousand to repair the dykes and rebuild 
the trunks, and as much more for stock and a 
modern mill. Sometimes I sit here and dream 
how wonderful it would be if I had the money 
to restore Little Canes to its former footing of 
one of the finest rice plantations in the South.” 
She laughed a little, but her grey eyes sparkled 
between her heavy lashes, misty with the vision 
of her gorgeous dream. 

“But do you never tire of the monotony of 
the swamps — never long for the big world out- 
side and the things that make the life of the 
average woman of the world — teas, dances, 
theatres and naturally — admirers?” 

“Sometimes — ^yes,” she said, with a little of 
the unconscious longing that sometimes stirred 
her heart for the things of youth and gayety. 


[ 122 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


the joyous unthinking gladness with which the 
young take life. “Yes. I miss the gayety 
and friendship, the recreations and pleasures 
young people enjoy even in our little villages.” 
Her wistful eyes rested on his for a glance and 
what she saw there startled her, for a sudden 
flush spread over her charming vital face and 
she got slowly to her feet. 

“I’ve enjoyed our talk,” she said. “I must 
go to grandfather now. He will appreciate 
your method of handling the trouble and thank 
you himself when he is well enough to hear of 
it.” 


r 12:1 ] 


CHAPTER XIII 


T he fish fry was an annual event to which 
the whole population of the Santee 
looked forward with pleasurable antici- 
pation. It was a colossal affair in entertain- 
ment given in sections, as it were, and each 
section brought out the families, their guests, 
servants and retainers to the last head, for 
when the whites had sated their appetites the 
colored people also feasted to repletion on the 
surplus. 

The guests came to the fry in bateaux, on 
horseback and on wheels, and nearly every 
vehicle carried a lantern slung to the rear axles, 
but the presence in the long wide-gapped pro- 
cession of equestrians was denoted only by the 
sound of song and laughter. Dozens of family 
squabbles, dozens of flirtations which would 
later result in family squabbles, and dozens of 
genuine romances moved through the fragrant, 
pungent dusk to the fish fry on the coast. 

Servants and committees on arrangements 
had spent the day on the sands and the Weather 
Bureau at Washington had favored them with 


[ 124 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


ideal weather conditions. The night was warm 
without heaviness; there had been a rain the 
previous evening which had packed hard the 
sand on the shore, but now the sky was clear 
and starred, and the air so still that the candles 
burned without flickering. 

A table low enough to the ground to be used 
in comfort by people sitting on cushions and 
rugs on the ground had been built. The dam- 
ask with which it was covered, the silver and 
glass which sparkled in the light of dozens of 
candles in glass and silver candelabra were 
treasures from chests and closets of the dif- 
ferent families participating in the fete, and 
the roses that banked the center of the table 
were gathered from as many different gardens. 

Except for the lights on the serving tables 
dimly to be seen behind thick growths of pal- 
mettos, and the glow of the fires over which 
gnome-like black figures bent and turned, cook- 
ing the freshly caught fish, the hot corn dodgers 
and coffee, there was no other light but the 
misty silver of the stars, and where the gleam 
of the candles on the table ended soft darkness 
closed in like a solid wall. 

The diners were not homogeneously 
dressed. Some of the men wore rough hunting 

[ 125 ] 


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costume, others wore the conventional white 
linen evening dress of the Santee. Some of the 
women appeared in sport costume, and others 
in anything at all suited to the hazard of a pic- 
nic on the beach. Eea Corbin, the richest heir- 
ess in the Santee, who spent much of her time 
“outside,” was booted and breeched like a man. 
The only evening gown, a glowing, diaphanous 
cloud of rosy tulle, was worn by a young woman 
of striking beauty and poise seated at the far 
end of the long table, suggesting nothing so 
much as Beauty before a sacrificial altar. 
Elise wore trim linen riding clothes and arrived 
late. 

She had asked Selby to ride with her, and 
how much that had delighted him nobody knew 
except Selby himself. In the past few weeks 
Elise had subtly changed toward her grand- 
father’s overseer man. She had given him 
every opportunity which her somewhat uncon- 
ventional soul could sanction. In a hundred 
little ways she had shown him that she liked 
him immensely ; and if he liked her in the same 
way, he would manage to acquaint her with the 
fact if there was no reason, no tie which bound 
him and of which he had kept her in ignorance. 

The ride out had been a dismal failure. 


[ 126 ] 


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They had gotten no further in conversation 
than the beauty and fragrance of the night, the 
weird, unchanging scenery and rich possibili- 
ties of the swamp country, and finally, and God 
alone knew with what reluctance, she had given 
him up as an impossible job. She sat beside 
him at dinner, smiling and laughing in a kind 
of reckless abandon of gayety, and once she 
lifted her untouched glass, leaned to him with 
sparkling eyes and provocative lips. 

“To you!” she said softly, and drained the 
wine. 

Delight swelled in the heart of Selby. With 
an uncontrollable impulse his fingers closed 
over her cool hand lying beside her on the 
cushions. 

“To us!” he whispered boldly, and in the 
loud sweet singing of negro voices, the music of 
guitar and banjo that swelled suddenly from 
behind a thicket, his ejaculation reached her 
ears alone. 

That fish fry would always be remembered 
for its beauty and for its gayety. The whole 
souls of the company went out in jests and 
laughter, and suddenly the moon emerged as it 
were from the whispering waves like a bright 
and blameless soul from the grave, and pres- 

[ 127 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


ently sailed clear, upward into untroubled 
space; a glory serene, smiling and unanswer- 
able. 

No one remembered ever to have seen the 
moon so large or so bright. Atomized silver 
poured like April rain on the glittering sand, 
flowed like tides across the ocean waves ; at the 
same time heavenly odors of flowers began to 
move on the vagrant breezes hither and thither, 
to change, to return and pass like disembodied 
spirits engaged in some tranquil and celestial 
dance. 

It became cooler and the women left the table 
in search of light wraps, and men tied sweaters 
around their necks by the arms. The cooking 
fires, fed by fragrant driftwood, became flam- 
ing beacons, tall and red. Cushions were 
moved nearer them for the diners to sit on, and 
logs had been thoughtfully provided to lean 
against while they drank their coffee, and 
cigars and cigarettes where they could most 
easily be reached. 

The fish fry as a gathering was over and it 
was only a question now of how long the people 
would care to stay. Men and women paired otf, 
as is the inevitable custom of young humanity. 
Sometimes two men and one woman would 


[ 12 ?] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


group, but always after a few moments one of 
the men would go away “to get something” and 
would not return. 

Selby and Elise sat together, their backs 
against a log. 

“Look at Aunt Ellen Lou over there,” she 
whispered, leaning very close. “She is pre- 
tending not to see us, but is watching us like a 
hawk. She is the grapevine telegraph of the 
Santee. Wouldn’t it be fun to start her 
going?” 

“How?” asked Selby stupidly, peering at 
the little overdressed woman on the other side 
of the fire. 

‘ ‘ For instance, if we held hands a second and 
let her see it. That would be the crowning 
touch of the night’s enjoyment for her to tell 
about it to everybody here. ’ ’ 

Selby reached for the little hand lying near 
his own and they both looked boldly at Aunt 
Ellen Lou, who began to whisper to her nearest 
neighbor. 

“Now,” whispered Elise, “she is happy,” 
and was for withdrawing her hand, but they 
clung together, and each could feel the pulses 
beating in the finger tips of the other, and Elise 
felt brazen, unabashed, and deliriously happy. 

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There was another shifting of groups and 
through the silvery rain of moon mist the girl 
in rosy tulle floated toward them; then quick 
little joyful cries of “Aline!” “Lisa!” and 
Miss Ravenell and the rosy girl were kissing 
each other and laughing, and amid the joyous 
flutter of quick question and interrupted reply 
Selby was conscious of Miss Vannes’ well-re- 
membered languid intonations accepting hos- 
pitality at Little Canes for the night, and felt 
the pressure of her cool assured hand as Elise 
Ravenell named him as her friend, “Mr. Bu- 
ford.” 

“It can be only for the night, Lisa, I am sorry 
to say. I am due to return with Rea Corbin 
to New York at the week-end, and I have so 
many kin folks to say howdy to before then.” 
She favored Selby with a brilliant, enigmatic 
smile, gave her friend an airy caress and joined 
Aunt Ellen Lou, who just then was the happy 
center of an interested group to which she was 
disseminating a bit of very interesting and 
wholly foundationless gossip. 


[ 130 ] 


CHAPTER XIV 


S ELBY rode back to Little Canes through 
the black shadows of the swamp lands 
and along the moon-dusted high grounds 
of the pines, following in the wake of Aunt 
Ellen Lou ’s ancient barouche, that conveyed the 
elegant Miss Vannes and the happy young mis- 
tress of that plantation. 

Aunt Ellen Lou sandwiched herself into the 
buckboard of neighbors who would keep her, as 
a matter of course, until her conveyance ar- 
rived to take her back to her own home, and 
Selby led the brown mare ridden by Elise to the 
coast. 

Between the humors of the mare, when she 
consented to travel peacefully beside his ani- 
mal, Selby rode as one in the nightmare of an 
awful dream, following mechanically the 
flickering star of lantern light that swayed 
beneath the axle of the crazy old vehicle that 
had seen better days in the far-gone time when 
Aunt Ellen Lou, beauty and belle, an exotic 
product of one of the most, and in their own 
estimation, the most, patrician family of 


[ 131 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Charleston, came as a bride to the rice lands of 
the Santee. 

Laughter and the happy tones of the girls’ 
voices floated back to him on the fragrant 
breezes of the night until he lingered so far in 
the rear that the girls reached Little Canes and 
the decrepit old retainer had unharnessed the 
horses and was rubbing down their ridgy bar- 
rels with wisps of salt grass when he rode into 
the yard. 

Selby routed old Absalom from sleep in his 
nearby hutch, left the saddle horses to his care 
and went on through the silent house to his own 
room. 

Numbly he began to undress by the light of 
the moon, that still sailed high and flowed 
through the open windows, lying in luminous 
squares across the floor. He threw aside coat 
and collar, unlaced his shoes, absentmindedly 
pouring the white beach sand they held upon 
the floor, where it lay in little splotchy black 
shadows along the blacker boards. 

Selby sat upon the side of his bed for a long 
time, the vacuum which was his mind incapable 
of formulating a consecutive thought, paralyzed 
by a specter in the very lovely person of Aline 
Vannes jumping so unexpectedly at him out of 

[ 132 ] 


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his past, which only a short while since was his 
actual present. 

Selby knew Miss Vannes was of the South, 
but thought vaguely that the state of Louisiana 
had been honored with her nativity. And she 
was an older woman than the pretty mistress of 
Little Canes, one well schooled in the world and 
with an infinite capacity for malice and a cold- 
blooded determination to acquire the things she 
wished of life. Moreover, she was a woman to 
whom he had once offered himself and by whom 
he had been very properly rejected as being of 
no account in her scheme of things, and she 
knew the whole wretched story of Van der 
Spool’s undoing; and his overt criminal act 
that had robbed her of a husband, a fortune and 
a place in the world very much to her liking. 
Would his miserable story gain anything in 
sympathy and favor through Miss Vannes’ 
telling? 

Then to complicate matters there was his 
criminal folly on the beach that very night 
when he had dared to show Elise a tiny glimpse 
of his feeling for herself, and she had inno- 
cently and painstakingly exhibited the pure 
fresh feeling of her heart to him. Clearly he 


[ 133 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


was a fool, had always been a fool, and the 
greatest folly of his whole asinine career was in 
stopping at the plantation house or Little Canes 
at all. 

As Selby sat nursing his forgotten shoe the 
silver of the misty moonlight waned, the sky 
above the swampline, painted a dense velvety 
black, grew faintly luminous, gilded itself with 
elusive spirit gold, then blushed to rosy crim- 
son under his unseeing eyes. Another day was 
breaking gloriously over the Santee when 
Selby, who had forgotten to go to bed, crept 
through the silent house and went out upon the 
old pier. 

Tides from the far-away ocean washed in 
and the swollen river was full of short, fierce 
waves that struck the small boats moored to the 
jutting cypress trunk repeated rapid blows and 
dashed the high spray over them. 

Selby dropped into the angry current and 
swum about in the backwater of the pier. The 
icy bite of the water revived him and the strong 
battle he was obliged to put up with the chop- 
ping current steadied his shattered nerves. 

Cooled and refreshed, he dressed and went 
back to the stables, saddled his horse and rode 


[ 134 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


calmly out into the green roads where his work 
lay, and where presently the band of laughing, 
happy blacks would swarm singing to the labor 
of another day. 


[ 136 ] 


CHAPTER XV 


J UST as Elise was finishing her prepara- 
tions for bed, there came a soft tap on her 
door and Miss Vannes followed it into the 
room. Elise was winding a snarl of hair around 
the end of her second plait, and as Creasy, 
sleeping and sulky, followed Miss Vannes, bear- 
ing her huge ivory and silver brush, a gold 
and crystal cream jar and other sundry trifles 
indispensable to that exotic young woman’s 
night toilet, Elise hastily cleared a space on top 
of the high dresser for the aristocratic belong- 
ings of her guest and made way for her before 
the little dressing stand. 

It was the hour of hair brushing and con- 
fidences, and confidences on the subject of “Mr. 
Buford” were what Aline wished to extract 
from her presumably guileless friend. There 
is some subtle quality connected with the 
ancient rites of the hair brush and the cold- 
cream jar when practised at night that loosens 
feminine tongues and lures them through the 
gates of indiscretion; gates which in the thin 
garish light attending the matutinal toilet they 


[ 136 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


would never dream of approaching, they un- 
latch and throw wide under the magic influence 
of candlelight and these twin servitors and 
conservers of youth and charm. 

True to the innate guile of her complex 
nature, Aline approached the subject at the 
moment agitating her lively curiosity circui- 
tously. Tolletson ’s phlegmatic but patent devo- 
tion or adoration of her friend had not escaped 
the lively though languid seeming orbs of Miss 
Vannes, and she laughingly alluded to his 
“lumbering love-making,” an old jest between 
these young women even in the days before 
Aline had spread her brilliant wings in search 
of fairer and more fruitful groves than those 
her native Santee offered. 

“ ‘Time has not withered nor custom staled 
your infinite variety’ to him since we were gig- 
gling girls in pigtails and pinafores,” she said 
laughingly. ‘ ‘ Tell me, honey, has he ever done 
anything but stare and stare and be a villain 
still?” 

Elise laughed at her friend’s quaint para- 
phrase. “Truly he has not. Aline. His awful 
stare is simply a habit, I am convinced. He 
stares at Rea Corbin and Jack Innes with quite 
the same concentrated essence of brutality or 


[ 137 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


whatever name you wish to call it by — 
‘hah!’ ” 

“And neither Jacqueline Innes nor Rea 
Corbin quite as well worth staring at as the 
lovely Elise Ravenell,” Miss Vannes confided 
to her friend’s dressing glass. “Rea, now — I 
thought this new man, Mr, — Mr. — Colonel 
Ravenell ’s overseer, rather empresse with that 
young damsel’s flamboyant charm.” 

“Oh — I hadn’t noticed. It may be. Rea is 
a lovely girl.” 

Neither had Miss Vannes any ground for the 
just expressed thought, but that being a small 
matter, she passed it in silence, bestowing 
absorbed attention upon her visage in the 
shadowy mirror. 

“Um-huh,” she observed directly to Elise ’s 
last remark, “and not as poor as the general 
run of beauty in the Santee. Where did Colo- 
nel Ravenell find this rather assured and 
good-looking overseer man?” 

“He didn’t find him. My brother Ravenell 
rescued him off Hog Island where he was 
washed from a wreck or something. He took 
to overseering as a duck takes to water, and we 
needed him — were glad to persuade him to 
stay.” 


[ 138 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“The old story of the toils of the Santee. 
Where was he going to or coming from when 
washed on Hog Island?” 

“I don’t know, Aline. The ship was the 
Ocean Queen, he says. You know how be- 
nighted we are here in the Santee. We seldom 
see even the Georgetown Gazette, and more sel- 
dom the Charleston Courier. Grandfather does 
not care for news of the outside world, and we 
wouldn’t even know there was a war in Europe 
if the price of cotton hadn’t gone soaring.” 

Aline shuddered in her frail Chinese lounge 
robe. 

“I know. How do you endure it, honey?” 

Miss Vannes’ sympathy was spontaneous 
and sincere, but not sufficiently disinterested to 
prompt an invitation to her friend to share the 
larger fields she herself had won to. Perhaps 
recollections of the meagre budget available to 
run the pretty fiat occupied by her father and 
herself on the fringe of gentility in New York 
deterred her ; perhaps an ulterior motive — fear 
of her friend’s personal pulchritude inter- 
fering in some personal plan of her own. The 
invitation was not forthcoming and Miss 
Vannes continued to mould her dainty, clean- 
cut chin with dabs of fragrant cream from her 

[ 139 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


crystal and gold jar, apparently forgetting that 
such an insignificant person as Colonel Raven- 
ell’s good-looking overseer man lived and had 
his being in the dismal confines of her own na- 
tive Santee. 

The last pat was given to her mot-white 
cheeks, the last silken strand of hair was 
twisted and curled and pinned into place where, 
on the morrow, when it should be released from 
its bonds and lightly fluffed, it would swirl, and 
lie about her face in such perfectly natural and 
negligent grace. She left the belongings to be 
gathered by the sulky and weary Creasy, and 
in her frail flame-colored Chinese robe bent 
above Elise curled among the pillows of the 
huge testered bed. 

“Good-night, honey,’’ she said, dropping a 
fleeting caress on Miss Ravenell’s cool clean 
cheek. “A trifle, just a suspicion of Damsel’s 
wonderful cream at night would improve and 
preserve even your wonderful complexion. ’ ’ 

The high red heels of her little satin mules 
clicked across the dim, bare corridor, the lock 
of her wide low door clicked softly behind her, 
and with a hasty glance about the shadowy 
room to make sure that no alien eye witnessed 
her action she drew from beneath the bed a 


[ 140 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


smart suitcase, unlocked it with a key on her 
silver chain and drew from the case a plain, 
serviceable-looking nightgown and a common 
cotton kimono. The exotic silk and lace gar- 
ments she wore were laid carefully over a 
chair and the plain put on, then Aline blew out 
her candle and climbed agilely into the gener- 
ous, hospitable bed. 

For long moments she lay wakeful, her bril- 
liant eyes staring upward to the stained, 
shadowy frescoes, and the expression in the 
wonderful orbs was neither languid nor mirth- 
ful. It was frankly curious and puzzled as 
their owner wondered and surmised what it 
meant to find John Buford Selby, the idle 
scapegrace son of old “Iron” Selby, posing as 
working overseer at Little Canes, one of the 
most poverty-ridden, run-down plantations in 
the whole of the dismal Santee. 

Well, time would unravel the mystery, and 
Miss Vannes believed that given time she could 
accomplish all her desires, even to becoming 
the wife of the man she should select, or more 
correctly the man whose place and power and 
worldly gear she wished to annex, with the man 
himself as a necessary disagreeable appendage. 

Sleep put a period to Aline ’s curious sur- 

[ 141 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


misings, but she woke in the cool grey of the 
early morning with the desire to know still 
lively and palpitating, and the only way to 
know, she concluded, was to find out. Conse- 
quently an early hour found her curled and 
groomed, booted and habited in her hostess’ 
cool linen, waiting on the steps for the mare to 
be brought for an early morning ride. 

Miss Vannes rode along green roads between 
acres of sibilantly whispering corn and oceans 
of waving cotton in all the gorgeous beauty of 
their wealth of pink and cream bloom. Grow- 
ing corn and cotton crops was an old and un- 
interesting story to her, and she paced gently 
through the fields of lush promise with bored, 
unseeing eyes, until a clump of trees growing 
above the crop level attracted her gaze. The 
rising sun burned a trifle more ardently than 
was comfortable to her tender flesh, and she 
rode for the cool-looking oasis to rest. 

The clump of shrubbery on the smooth face 
of the flat acres proved to he one of the ancient 
burying places of the plantation slaves, long 
since filled to overflowing and abandoned for a 
new plot. Miss Vannes drew the mare into the 
deep shadows of the deodars and sat down on 
the cool turf to wait. 


[ 142 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Her period of waiting was short, for pres- 
ently the mare arched her neck, and pointing 
her dainty ears voiced a shrill whinny. 
She had scented a friend ambling leisurely 
along a far road between the corn and sent a 
greeting according to her kind. Selby’s horse 
answered the little mare’s shrill call, its rider 
wheeled, and presently he also drew rein in the 
shadow of the graveyard deodars. 

“Good morning, Mr. S — Buford,” greeted 
Aline, looking mockingly at him from her seat 
in the tall grass. 

“Good morning. Miss Vannes,” he answered 
gravely, with a bleak glance at her lovely, 
malicious face. 

“Curious, how we meet, is it not, Mr. Bu- 
ford? You are the last person I would think of 
seeing here in the Santee. How far afield your 
friends’ surmises placed you, after all.” 

“Where, may I ask, have my friends been 
kind enough to place me?” 

“Oh, different localities. It was rumored 
that you were leading a revolution in South 
America, hunting big game in the Amazon 
country, captaining a division of the Foreign 
Legion — anything, in fact, but the truth.” 

“Anything but the truth,” Selby repeated, 
[ 143 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


but was unable to conclude the miserable 
thought of “hiding from punishment for the 
crime of manslaughter.” 

“Do you like farming, Mr. Buford?” Aline 
asked innocently. “And are you going to adopt 
it as a vocation?” 

“Farming? Miss Vannes, why trifle with me? 
Why not say at once what you feel it your duty 
to do?” 

Aline bit a rosy lip. Do? What in Heaven’s 
name did the man expect her to do? Clearly 
there was something behind this white mask of 
his face and desperately resigned demeanor — 
something she did not at all understand. Could 
it be the partial name he was masquerading 
under or reports of his former escapades which 
she might connect him with and verify? Pos- 
sibly his very cavalier offer of marriage to her- 
self which might prejudice Elise in his disfavor 
should the tale reach her ears. 

“What would be your course in the matter, 
John Buford, were you in my position?” she 
queried with confiding innocence. 

John Buford shook his head. 

“Don’t ask me that. Miss Vannes. You 
must do what your conscience dictates in this 

[ 144 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


matter. What you know is right regardless 
of our former friendship.” 

“No,” Aline denied gently. “John Buford, I 
cannot do that. ” So it was the ridiculous offer 
of marriage after all. What a prig this Puri- 
tan life in the Santee had made of the former 
New York Broadwayite. 

How opportunely and also how inoppor- 
tunely the trifling details of daily life intrude 
themselves into the tense moments of existence. 
Had not the strident voice of the plantation bell 
just then jangled brazenly across the brooding 
morning silence a little game of cross purposes 
between a pretty, overcurious woman and a 
tense-lipped, white-faced man might have been 
played to a different conclusion. 

Momentarily, while the first note of the bell 
crashed into the pause between them, Selby 
visualized the squat figure of the Little Canes 
cook swinging at the end of the frayed rope, 
bent brown legs dangling beneath her high 
trussed skirts as the upward pull of the big bell 
lifted her from the ground, and one familiar 
with the humors and vagaries of the cook could 
read the temper agitating her at the moment. 

Short, spiteful jangles signified that the 
Buckra’s breakfast was ready as much as she 

[ 145 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


proposed to make it ready. Take it or leave 
it. Long, rolling, sonorous strokes apprised her 
white folks that she had outdone herself and 
prepared a feast such as the finest cook might 
be proud of and the most finicky and exacting 
appetite approve. 

With the first stroke Miss Vannes stepped to 
the side of the uneasy mare. 

“The breakfast bell, is it not? And I am 
famished.” She offered a slim varnished boot 
and Selby tossed her lightly into the saddle, but 
he did not ride beside her back to the planta- 
tion house and breakfast. 


[ 146 ] 


CHAPTER XVI 


N ews of the grim tragedy being enacted 
in the old world, now nearing the end 
of its second awful chapter, echoed 
very faintly along the reaches and on the 
plantations of the Big and Little Santee. Ru- 
mors of things unprintable, horrors incredible 
percolated to these peaceful people pursuing 
the even tenor of their monotonous lives, and 
these rumors, damnable and brutal as was their 
import, savage with degenerate bestiality, 
seemed to them in the safe haven of their an- 
cestral homes, on the lands in the inviolable 
swamp country which was theirs, where 
nothing but the changing seasons varied the 
daily routine, much like the premonitions of a 
nightmare or the pages of a ghastly tale read, 
but not quite comprehended. 

They knew there was a terrible conflict 
among the peoples of Europe, and it held their 
interest principally, as Elise remarked to her 
friend Miss Vannes, because the price of cotton 
fluctuated with its bloody tides. But the 
knowledge touched their consciousness more 


[ 147 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


nearly as one after another of their English 
friends and neighbors, homeward bound to join 
the forces of their motherland, called at Little 
Canes to say farewell. 

Tolletson was one of the first of these to hear 
the call, and rode over to Little Canes one hot 
summer morning to take leave and incidentally 
unburden his mind of a purpose lying long dor- 
mant there. Tying his horse to the low swing- 
ing limb of an elm he walked quietly through the 
rear dooryard to the side gallery where the 
Colonel on his chaise-lounge was deep in his 
morning nap, Elise idling distraitly about in 
the garden below where clumps of floating pun- 
gent crepe myrtle grew near the railing and 
roses and honeysuckle fought for unruly prece- 
dence around the sagging pillars. Other 
flowers, starved and weed-choked, persisted in 
sending forth spasmodic clusters and spikes of 
atrophied bloom. A forlorn old hen wandered 
busily and a glittering black snake twisted sinu- 
ously across his half-obliterated path, the only 
living things beside the girl. 

The melancholy space was once a formal 
garden, the pride and care of stately Eavenell 
dames, many of whom slept a stone’s throw 
from its weedy confines beneath ranker growths 
[ 148 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


which quite hid from view quaint monuments 
and tablets set up pridefully in commemora- 
tion of their superior graces and virtues. 

Tolletson came suddenly around a clump of 
ramping shrubbery upon Elise where she 
leaned idly day dreaming upon an abortive hoe. 

“A big task for a little woman and a dull hoe, 
Miss Ravenell, hah?” he observed quietly. 

Elise glanced over the dreary prospect of 
lush weed and rioting shrubbery with dis- 
couraged eyes. 

“It does seem that nothing but humanity 
ever perishes in the Santee — does it not? Here 
are several generations of vine and shrubbery, 
and last winter the weather was so mild that 
even the tenderest weeds survived.” 

Her roving glance took in the garden and 
graveyard riot of growing things, coming to 
rest upon the drawn grey face of the sleeper 
above on the balcony. She sighed, but whether 
at the hopelessness of the thought of trying to 
subdue the overprodigalness of a too bountiful 
Nature or in sadness at the sight of the pitiful 
old man lying in peaceful unconsciousness 
under his swaying mosquito bars, Tolletson did 
not know. She moved a short distance down 


[ 149 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


the grassy walk and he paced quietly beside 
her. 

Silence held them until they reached the rust- 
ing iron lacework of the graveyard fence and 
stood looking down on the draped urns and 
ornate slabs guarded by puffy-cheeked cherubs 
smirking under long years of accumulated 
lichens. Just below them lay a colony of flat, 
mossy slabs deeply chiseled with prolix bits 
from the life histories of the dust resting be- 
neath them. 

“Elise Ravenell Corbin, Elise Ravenell Dot- 
terer, Elise Ravenell Rushmore,” read Toilet- 
son. “Every generation at Little Canes has 
had its Elise Ravenell, Miss Elise?” 

“For the past five generations there has been 
a woman bearing that name here, but unless 
there be a daughter in my brother’s family, if 
he has a family, I am the last of the unbroken 
line. The Ravenells are a dying race, Mr. Tol- 
letson. As with so many families of the old 
South, the Civil War hastened our end.” 

“War — yes, that destroyer of the human 
animal. Do you know that America is on the 
verge of war. Miss Ravenell? A real war, in 
which men of the North and South will fight 


[ 150 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


beside the rest of the decent peoples of the 
world.” 

“War! Here? What nation is bold enough 
to make war upon the United States?” Elise 
exclaimed with incredulous pride. 

‘ ‘ The swine which have been slavering at the 
gates of civilization for the past year or more. 
I am an Englishman, Miss Ravenell, and while 
at peace my country did not need me — had no 
place for me in her scheme of things, but now 
the ranks of her fighting men are open to me 
and I am going home.” 

Elise gazed at him long and clearly, her level 
gaze really taking in the man’s strange person- 
ality for the first time. 

“You are doing a brave thing, Mr. Tolletson, 
and I wish you a safe passage home, and when 
your work is well done a happy return to the 
Santee, if you desire to return.” 

“I do so desire. Miss Ravenell,” he said 
quietly. “When we have thrashed the beggars 
I would like to come back to the Santee and — 
to you. I have wanted to tell you something 
for a long time but felt that I was not ready, not 
worthy, but a man purified by the fire of battle 
for his country may venture to feel differently. 

[ 151 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Miss Ravenell, when I come back — if I do come 
back, may I say it to you then? ” 

Elise sustained the calm stare of his cool 
blue eyes very steadily as he spoke. There was 
that in his quiet voice and uniquely ugly coun- 
tenance that commanded her respect. 

“Mr. Tolletson, I like and respect you sin- 
cerely,” she said gravely. “You are doing a 
fine brave thing, and I admire you for it. More 
than that I cannot say now, except that I know 
you will do your work well and that I hope you 
will return whole and safe.” 

“Thank you. Miss Ravenell. There is, as 
your brother says, nothing to prevent kidding 
myself into hoping. Good-bye.” 

Elise placed her hand in his, clasping it with 
warm friendliness. A faint zephyr sprang up, 
scattering the rose petals and drifting them 
along between them like blood-colored shreds. 

They stood thus a long moment, then turned 
and went up the steps to the Colonel who had 
wakened and was regarding them through his 
mosquito bars with senile, curious eyes. 


[ 152 ] 


CHAPTER XVII 


M ISS VANNES, while at little Canes, 
was the soul of discretion, for nothing 
of which she was aware of the life and 
previous position of the Colonel’s overseer man 
passed her lips. At breakfast, changed from 
linen riding clothes into one of her hostess ’ sim- 
ple white house gowns, she was charming in her 
beautiful simplicity and perfect social aplomb. 

In the environment of her girlhood she af- 
fected a bright yet quiet camaraderie of manner 
which included Selby in the Little Canes family 
circle, according him that social recognition of 
an agreeable though recent acquaintance. 

After the meal her respects were punctili- 
ously paid to the invalid on his chaise-lounge 
where talk of her father and other old friends 
of the Colonel, who had deserted the Santee for 
fuller life in the North, brightened a half hour 
of the long morning. 

Then Aunt Ellen Lou’s two rangy old horses, 
harnessed to the ancient barouche, came around 
and her leave-taking was a lesson in the best 
metropolitan manner. Ensconcing herself in 


[ 153 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


state on the lumpy rear seat, the rickety old 
vehicle bore her with all her beautiful graces 
from Little Canes. 

During Miss Vannes’ visit to the plantation 
house Selby had thought long and deeply, and 
had arrived at a decision which he proceeded to 
act upon early the following morning. He de- 
cided to leave Little Canes, hut before his de- 
parture he would tell Elise and the Colonel 
everything. 

It would be hard, very much harder than it 
would have been previous to the night of the 
fish fry and the events of that memorable oc- 
casion which had now progressed too far to be 
ignored or overlooked as an ebullition of high 
spirits or youthful folly. 

Elise loved him, he was sure, and God knew 
how well and hopelessly his love was hers ; con- 
sequently, confession was nothing but her due 
and his necessity. 

When he entered the breakfast room keyed 
up to the ordeal before him Elise was, as he 
hoped, there to pour his coffee and serve the 
meal. She was in a linen habit and a scarlet 
bow beneath her chin lent a sort of spiritual 
glow to the creamy paleness of her face. There 
was, too, an unusual, charming animation of 

[ 154 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


manner and an absence of a certain restraint 
which sometimes characterized her attitude to- 
ward Selby. 

“I like Miss Aline,” she said a little wist- 
fully, “though her visit was a mere pop call. 
Isn’t she beautiful?” she asked with generous 
enthusiasm. 

“Exotically beautiful,” Selby conceded 
promptly. “Her facial contour has that suave 
insolence that suggests intimacy with ‘sure 
enough’ pearls, sable collars, genuine marble 
bathtubs and diamond-tipped things gener- 
ally.” 

Elise laughed, then sighed. “Yes. And her 
loveliness deserves them. I hope she meets 
her just deserts in that respect.” 

Selby was silent while Elise buttered gen- 
erously a plate of hot cakes for him and placed 
a silver dish of new honey nearer. 

“Biding this morning. Miss Elise?” he asked, 
his eyes on the scarlet bow at her throat. 

A pink mist suffused the pallor of her cool 
cheeks, but she laughed frankly. “I hoped 
you ’d ask me to ride a while with you, ’ ’ she said 
honestly. 

“I also hoped for your companionship this 
[ 155 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


morning, Miss Eavenell, but not for a ride,” he 
said seriously. “Have you time for a sail?” 

The pink mist lifted again from her collar, 
drifting to cheeks and brow. “Time? Yes. 
Are you going to fish?” 

Selby shook his head. “Not today. Miss 
Elise. I have something I want to tell you.” 
His face whitened at thought of the “some- 
thing,” and Elise put the shining expanse of 
table between them. 

“Is sailing a necessary part of the pro- 
gram?” she asked lightly, a little of her former 
restraint showing in voice and manner. 

“I would prefer to talk to you without fear 
of interruption,” he said, “if you will indulge 
me. Miss Eavenell.” 

“Very well,” she answered quietly. “I will 
change in a few moments,” and she went slowly 
from the dim, wide room. 

She joined Selby on the pier a half hour later 
in a rough khaki skirt and jacket, all her soft 
hair tucked snugly beneath one of her brother ’s 
old caps. The boat was ready and Selby gave 
her a hand to help her from the pier. They 
were both silent and a little constrained as he 
worked the boat down the river and across the 

[ 156 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


choppy waves into the calm waters of the open 
sea. 

The sailboat swept on, silent and swift, skim- 
ming the sea as lightly as a gull. Now and 
again the wind, crisp, exhilarating, delicious, 
caused her to luff, and at such times it required 
all Selby’s skill to bring her back and hold the 
course. The sky was radiantly fair and cloud- 
less, tarnished only in the far southeast by a 
dim and dull, low-lying reef of haze. Sunlight, 
crystal clear, showed molten gold upon the 
swaying waters and the frosty crests that raced 
the boat, until, distanced, they fell back and 
broke with a brisk rattle that sounded like the 
plaudits of an audience, to incite her to fresh 
endeavor. 

With a rapidity all but startling the main- 
land dropped astern, fading to a blurred line 
setting apart the sapphirine waste of sky and 
sea. From the scuppers came a brisk gurgling, 
from beneath the bows a sharp hissing, from 
astern the swish and purl of the wake, and an 
occasional smart smack as the tender broke 
through a roller or came down from a crest. 

Soon the cobalt line of Hog Island assumed 
shape between the sapphire of the sea floor and 
the bland azure of the sky. 

[ 157 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Selby sailed the boat beyond the island, tack- 
ing and working her up near the shore where 
he had been washed that memorable morning, 
flotsam from the foundered Ocean Queen. 

Dropping the mooring hook he lowered and 
furled the sail, then turned to the girl in the 
stern, regarding him with speculative, curious 
eyes. 

“Evidently your intention is to land on Hog 
Island, Mr. Buford. Shall I wait for you in 
the boat ? ’ ’ 

Selby was over the side, standing knee-deep 
in the warm swirl. 

“There is something on the island which I 
wish to show you. Miss Ravenell. Something 
which I should have shown you or Colonel 
Ravenell long ago. Permit me,” and he held 
out his arms. 

With not the least hesitation she placed her- 
self gently within them, balancing herself with 
one arm laid lightly across his shoulders, and 
with a few strides Selby placed her, dry-shod, 
upon the sands. Returning to the boat he rum- 
maged in the cockpit, produced a small garden 
hoe and an old gunny sack, rejoining Elise upon 
the beach. 

Followed by the wondering girl he tramped 
[ 158 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


up the rise of the slope until he came to its crest, 
below which lay the little wash in which what he 
mentally called the thing, guarded the buried 
gold. 

With some difficulty Selby located the 
marker he had placed near the unknown’s re- 
mains and, judging the distance as accurately 
as he could from them to the place of the bags, 
began to dig. Scraping the soft sand with the 
hoe he soon had his cache clear and laid them, 
as once before, in a row upon the sand. 

“These little bags. Miss Ravenell,” he said 
quietly when he had placed the last one there, 
“contain upward of ninety thousand dollars in 
gold coin. It is undoubtedly the money stolen 
from Colonel Ravenell, the story of which your 
brother told me in detail. I will tell you how I 
discovered it, why I kept the knowledge of its 
hiding place to myself when I was rescued, and 
through the time since, when I have been ac- 
cepting so much from the family at Little 
Canes.” 

Elise gazed fascinated at the bags drying in 
the sun, speechless under the surprise of the 
marvelous good fortune, of the fantastic dream 
of her brother coming true, the treasure ma- 


[ 159 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


terializing in its original form under Selby’s 
hands. 

With wide, wondering eyes and tightly 
clasped hands she nodded to him to continue 
his Arabian Night tale, and sitting beside her 
he brazenly turned back the pages of his life’s 
story, relating the incidents which shaped the 
course which ended in his advent at Little 
Canes. 

Pictures of his mad career as an idle man 
about town he painted with truthful high lights ; 
the disagreement with his father, the card game 
in which he had struck down a companion, his 
intoxicated flight aboard the Ocean Queen, 
ending with his days of misery and remorse 
preceding his rescue by Ravenell, during which 
he had accidentally discovered the treasure. 

His life at Little Canes Elise knew, but his 
temptation to appropriate the money and his 
contemplated flight from the Santee he laid 
bare without palliation or excuse, daring after- 
ward to tell her that the worshipping love he 
had come to feel for herself had held him from 
this last, and now he knew, worst act of criminal 
folly. 

Tears were in the girl’s eyes when he had 
[ 160 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


finished, trickling over her white cheeks and 
falling in warm splashes on her clasped hands. 

“Oh, John Buford!” she exclaimed in a 
thrilled voice, unconsciously giving him his old, 
familiar name. “Let us go to grandfather! 
How can I tell you what I feel?” 

Two very sober people tramped back to the 
boat, John Buford carrying the gunny sack of 
gold across his shoulder, Elise trailing behind, 
carrying the little garden hoe. Neither noticed 
the fact that the girl waded through the surf, 
climbing, wet and bedraggled to the knees, un- 
aided aboard the boat. 


[ 161 ] 


CHAPTER XVIII 


I T was anything but an enviable frame of 
mind that Ravenell carried with the hoo- 
doo man from the Santee. Again, and he 
told himself, for the last time, had his cherished 
hope been dashed to the depths of disappoint- 
ment, and the present measure of disappoint- 
ment showed the certainty he had felt in ulti- 
mately recovering the stolen treasure. 

Abandoning the first intention of returning 
his prisoner to Georgetown, from which place 
he had taken him to the Santee, he turned the 
nose of the launch southward to the port of 
Charleston. 

No pressing duty or business that he recog- 
nized recalled him to Little Canes, and it helped 
to salve his mood of fierce resentment against 
the groaning failure in the bows to incommode 
him as much as possible by removing him far 
from the haunts of his pernicious being. 

Dropping him into the choppy sea would 
have been balm to the angrily smarting feelings 
of the undisciplined boy, but under his chagrin 
and disgust at the failure of the man to ma- 
terialize results of his boasted powers there 
[ 162 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


lurked a subconscious fear of these very powers 
he doubted. Superstition is inherent in the 
consciousness of every human. Environment 
and association had cultivated it in Ravenell’s 
disposition; he had imbibed a deep and lasting 
taint of the negroid trait of that emotion from 
the black breast of his foster mother which 
only a total reconstruction of his spiritual and 
physical being could eliminate ; consequently he 
did the only thing he dared in order to 
appease his spiteful ire, and that consisted in 
making as much trouble as possible for its un- 
happy and discredited cause. 

It was late afternoon when he slid up the 
Cooper River and nosed into the ruck of craft 
along the harbor side, evicting without cere- 
mony the scared and suffering magic man from 
the launch. Watching him until he had quite 
vanished among the shipping and litter of the 
wharf, Ravenell hailed a negro loafer, highly 
picturesque in a red flannel shirt and morbid 
blue overall, who fawned on the white youth 
from the Santee with all the naive delight of a 
friendly mongrel dog recognizing one from 
whom he expects kindness and benefit. 

“Howdy, Mist’ Rav’nell,” he exclaimed with 
great show of joyful recognition, “how all dem 

[ 163 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


swamp mans an’ oomans?” His ivory grin was 
a wide and engaging welcome. 

“All right, Scipy. Everything fine. Stay 
with the boat, will yon, until you see me again? 
It will he late, hut don’t leave until I come. 
Hear?” and tossing the grinning man a coin 
Eavenell strode up into the sleepy town. 

Around the curve of the Battery and up King 
Street he went to a weatherbeaten door from 
which the once green paint peeled in scrofulous 
ridges, entered familiarly and climbed the dark 
stairs between two taller buildings which led 
into a room in the rear. Cheap, and much bat- 
tered chairs and stained, rickety tables littered 
with mussed papers, cumbered the wide, soiled 
floor space, and groups of languid men idled in 
and out of a rear room, the door to which was 
concealed by the same mouldy paper which 
covered the other walls. 

Eavenell seated himself and took up a copy 
of the News and Courier, skimming the con- 
servative headlines of the sheet with bored, 
uninterested glance. From a slit in the pa- 
pered door a face slyly reconnoitered the room 
before the owner of the face insinuated his bulk 
through, carefully closing the opening behind 
him. 


[ 164 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


The man approached Ravenell’s table by 
easy stages, the boy gave him a surly nod and 
silently placed a coin beside him upon the soiled 
table. Just as silently the man placed change 
from the coin and a wire bottle opener upon the 
table, Ravenell nodded curtly and the man 
strolled uninterestedly away. 

Ravenell thrust the coins and opener into his 
breeches pocket, threw aside the paper and 
walked into the rear room where he found a 
sprinkling of men and youths absorbing cold 
beer from the original bottles and a couple of 
card and crap games in leisurely progress. On 
his entrance another Greek, the replica of the 
one in the front room, lifted a section of the 
floor and brought forth a handful of dripping, 
frosted bottles of amber fluid. Ravenell ex- 
hibited his opener, selected a bottle and was 
about to refresh himself when he was hailed 
from a table of crap shooters in the corner. 

“Double R, by great Henry’s mother! 
When did you break out of the swamp, boy?” 
Ravenell took the chair his friend kicked cor- 
dially in his direction and joined the desultory 
game the party were engaged in. 

There was more conversation and drinking 
than play, and the party were becoming weary 

[ 165 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


when the talk turned on war and the all- 
absorbing fluctuating price of cotton. 

“There really is a war, fellows, and we’re 
going to get into it before long,” said Bullard, 
a tall, exquisitely groomed young man with a 
tired lined face, strewing the speckled cubes 
upon the table. 

“Why be so disturbingly positive about it, 
fellow? There is plenty of time to get in a 
sweat when we do go to war — if we go, ’ ’ a com- 
panion answered with good-natured malice. 
“Or if nothing short of war will cool your 
heated Southern blood, why wait until we get 
in? There is plenty of room ‘over there’ for a 
few more bloodthirsty fellows.” 

“You’ve said a bookful,” answered Bullard 
quietly, ‘ ‘ and I ’m going to take up some of that 
spare room right now. Any of you fellows 
want to join me?” 

“Thank you, not I, Bullard. I am content to 
wait until the Charleston Guards are mustered 
in for service overseas,” the other answered, 
laughing. “But how about your fire-eating 
cousin from the Santee ? ’ ’ 

“Yes, how about it. Cousin Eavenell?” and 
Bullard’s hand fell persuasively upon the 
youth’s shoulder. 


[ 166 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“You mean that, Cousin Bullard?” and 
Ravenell stared at his courtesy kinsman with 
bent brows. 

“Nothing ever more seriously,” Bullard re- 
plied with a quick smile, the magic of which 
wiped from his old-young face all lines of weary 
boredom. 

The hairbrained escapade appealed strongly 
to the present mood of the undisciplined boy, 
and he took no time for consideration, if, in fact, 
his mental capacity enabled him to consider 
adequately such a step. Burning with angry 
disappointment at the farcical failure of his 
last effort at locating the place of the hidden 
treasure, bored and wearied to the limit of a 
not great endurance of the monotonous life in 
the Santee for which he had little taste and no 
inclination, and could see nothing that prom- 
ised change in the daily dulness of life there, 
his courtesy cousin’s suggestion of a trip to 
the land which to him meant Life and Romance 
could not be denied. 

“If it suits you. Cousin Bullard, I am more 
than charmed,” he laughed recklessly. “The 
Ravenells always made better soldiers than 
they did planters, and Elise is a better planter 


[ 167 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


than I will ever be. When do we go from 
here?” 

“Tonight,” answered Bullard carelessly. 
“I sail for New York tonight and join a contin- 
gent for overseas next week. Sure you want 
to come along?” 

“Certain sure,” Eavenell answered firmly. 
“The sooner the better will please me.” 

“Good. I have a few more arrangements 
to make, and as time presses, let’s be on our 
way.” 

The sobered party trooped from the Blind 
Tiger card room down the dark stairs and out 
into King Street, now silent and almost deserted 
under a calm white moon. Bullard and Raven- 
ell bade their friends an almost solemn good- 
bye and went together around the curve of 
the narrow street onto the Battery where the 
dilapidated old Bullard mansion looked grimly 
out to sea. 

Bullard opened the ponderous front door 
with his latchkey and they entered the dark 
echoing spaces of the hall lighted only by vague, 
fugitive moonbeams struggling through stained 
glass, and groped their way to the sleeping 
room above. 

“Mother and the girls are at Summerville,” 
[ 168 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Bullard explained as he lighted a candle stub. 
“Bade them good-bye yesterday.” 

By the flickering light of the candle stub Rav- 
enell scrawled a note to his sister and another to 
his grandfather, laconically informing them that 
he, with his “Cousin Bullard,” sailed at dawn 
for service in a “Foreign Legion overseas.” 

It was a phrase that intrigued his imagina- 
tion when uttered by the older man, and meant 
to his boyish imagination Romance and all the 
opportunities of his wildest dreams. 

When he had finished the notes they blew out 
the little light and groped downstairs and out 
onto the moon-washed Battery. Pacing bare- 
headed the stiff wind that swept in from the 
sea, they walked down among the quiet ship- 
ping where they found the faithful Scipio 
curled in the bow of the launch, sleeping the 
deep sleep of the care-free darkey guarding the 
property of his white friend. 

Ravenell aroused him with an ungentle kick, 
gave him the letters and instructions to take 
the launch back to Little Canes, tossed him four 
of his remaining five dollars and turned his 
back on the slender boat, the last remaining 
web that bound him to his boyhood and youth 
in the Santee. 


[ 169 ] 


CHAPTER XIX 


M eantime Miss Vannes had not been 
idle. Her short visit to Aunt Ellen 
Lou and her dilapidated childhood 
home in the Santee, while tiresome to her city- 
cultivated tastes and boring in the extreme to 
her excitement-fed nerves, netted her much in 
satisfied curiosity in that she was authentically 
informed of the whereabouts of a one-time 
lover, although a discarded one, and a potential 
husband who had incontinently vanished from 
his familiar haunts, leaving neither trace nor 
track of the trail he had taken. 

Aline was not accustomed to overlooking de- 
tails, especially in any matter which touched her 
life or ambitions, and one of her first acts on 
reaching the flat in 63rd street was to rummage 
through a locked drawer of her writing desk, 
bringing to light an envelope of yellow news- 
paper clippings which she spread before her 
and carefully studied. 

These were columns of data relating to old 
“Iron” Selby, his interests and operations, to- 
gether with many pictures of the old man 


[ 170 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


illustrating these stories. There were cuts of 
his summer home at Bar Harbor, his New York 
mansion, his model farm in New Jersey and 
various other items concerning the elder Selby 
of great interest to Miss Vannes. Altogether, 
such an accumulation as would have done credit 
to the “who’s who” file of a metropolitan daily. 

Last but not least in interest to Aline was a 
clipping she studied longest. It was a four-line 
item offering one thousand dollars reward for 
authentic information of the whereabouts of 
John Buford Selby junior, and Aline ’s fine eyes 
deepened with amused malice as they rested 
upon it. 

Selecting a large, thick creamy envelope with 
paper to fit she began to write. It was a terse 
note informing the old “Iron King” that she 
had very recently seen the person referred to 
in the accompanying notice, and if he cared to 
call at the address embossed on the letter head 
the writer would be pleased to give him the in- 
formation he desired. Mention of reward was 
delicately refrained from, a circumstance which 
piqued the curiosity of the elder Selby when 
the note reached him, as Miss Vannes was 
cleverly sure would be the case. 

[ 171 ] 


SPIEIT GOLD 


Considerations of her toilet next claimed that 
young woman’s careful attention. An elab- 
orately simple morning dress cumbered the 
chair in the restricted space of the hall bedroom 
at 63rd street, west of the park, a tasteful after- 
noon gown swung from a ribboned hanger on 
the back of the door, and yet another — a pale, 
rosy mist of an evening gown lurked in its 
flowered box beneath the austere little iron bed. 
Aline did not know which of these costumes she 
would be called upon to wear, but like the good 
general she was her forces were ready and 
waiting to her hand. 

An early hour the following day found her 
bathed and groomed and the foundation of a 
toilet that would serve for either frock beneath 
her cotton kimono, and the neat maid elab- 
orately instructed that Miss Vannes was at 
home to no one but the elderly gentleman so 
carefully described. 

Three days of bored waiting before the 
pretty afternoon gown was hastily but deftly 
adjusted, and Aline, with just the proper shade 
of half friendly, wholly polite interest on her 
beautiful heart-shaped face, entered her recep- 
tion room, offering old “Iron” Selby a cool, 
slim hand. 


[ 172 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


The old fellow clawed at the dainty appen- 
dage, dropping it swiftly as something entirely 
superfluous to the business in progress, pulling 
Aline ’s letter from the pocket of his coat. 

“You are Miss Vannes, young lady? You 
say you are aware of the present whereabouts 
of my son?” 

Aline demurred gently. “I know where he 
was a week ago. I saw and conversed with him 
then.” 

“Where did you see the young rascal? Con- 
versed with him? Do you know him?” 

Aline bowed, smiling. “Very well, Mr. 
Selby. We were friends of several months’ 
standing before he left for the Santee.” 

“Santee? Where and what is the Santee? 
What is he doing there?” He fired the ques- 
tions at the young woman as though she were 
one of his army of hired employees. She 
sweetly ignored his gruff irritability and ex- 
plained gently. 

“The Santee is the rice country of South 
Carolina watered by the Big and Little Santee 
Eivers. It is my birthplace and old home, Mr. 
Selby. Your son was, and is now acting as over- 
seer for a kinsman of the Vannes’, Colonel 
Ravenell of Little Canes, ever since he left New 

[ 173 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


York. But no doubt he will tell you more of his 
life there than I can.” 

“ Hah ! ” The e j aculation would have been an 
explosion had it not terminated in a squeak. 
Old Selby fumbled tbe letter twisted in his 
hands, favored the plain but pretty room with 
his rapid, all-seeing glance of white furtiveness 
and wisely refrained from mentioning the of- 
fered reward. Time enough, he reflected. A 
check would reach her and it was good business 
to verify the girl’s wild statement. Old Selby 
reached for his hat, struggling awkwardly to 
escape from the inadequate chair. 

Miss Vannes forestalled his movement, and 
with a lithe bend lifted the hat from the floor 
beside him. It was a graceful, daughterly at- 
tention, and the “Hah!” with which he took the 
headgjear was intended as an expression of 
thanks. 

He retreated from the room and from the 
flat, wholly unconscious that the languid, lus- 
trous eyes staring at his lumpy back held an ex- 
pression of triumph not wholly unmixed with 
malicious amusement. 


[ 174 ] 


CHAPTER XX 


C OLONEL EAVENELL was deeply 
touched when Selby and Elise, return- 
ing from their adventure on Hog Island, 
acquainted him with the events of the morning, 
but joyful astonishment at sight of the restored 
treasure was not so overwhelming that he could 
not listen with sympathetic interest to Selby’s 
personal story, which was circumstantially 
what he had related to Elise. 

“And now,” that unhappy man said in con- 
clusion, “there is nothing to do but ask your 
forgiveness and take myself from Little Canes 
as speedily as possible.” 

“Not so fast, my son,” the Colonel answered 
quietly, “for I also have a confession to make. 
Since the first days of your coming to Little 
Canes I was haunted by a likeness in you to 
some one I had known, and gradually that fa- 
vor grew, until, searching backward in my old 
memory, it came to me clearly and distinctly. 
The name also held a familiar ring and coupled 
with the likeness made me certain that I was 
not romancing to myself when I became sure 


[ 175 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


that you were John Buford indeed, but with 
every right to the well-remembered surname of 
Selby as well. That you were in mental dis- 
tress a child could see, and even were you not 
the son of an old and well-liked friend I would 
have offered you the refuge of Little Canes. 
The Santee is a wonderful place for the healing 
of world wounds. We live very close to the 
heart of Nature, which has a beneficent effect 
in sloughing all but the essentials of life. 

“Time and peace are great agents in healing 
the hurts of the human mentality, John Buford 
Selby, and I hoped you had not been entirely 
unbenefited. Then your presence here, your 
work has been a boon to Elise and myself. If 
life here is not intolerable, why change? Your 
act is not, I assure you, without parallel in the 
lives of several of our neighbors. 

“Then the money,” waving an attenuated, 
waxen hand at the brown gunny sack crumpled 
in the corner. “Little Canes is a fine property, 
John Buford, and with this gold much can be 
done to restore and improve its natural re- 
sources. Also,” plaintively, “I thought lately 
that your interest was centered here.” 

“It is — it was!” Selby stammered, red- 


[ 176 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


dening. “Do you mean, sir, that you would 
give her to me ? ’ ’ 

“With my blessing, if you can win her. I 
knew and liked your father, boy, and had I 
taken his good advice there would be a greater 
inheritance for my grandchildren today. But 
wealth is not everything. Elise is a noble girl 
and will develop into a fine woman well worth 
any man’s winning. Permit me to wish you 
Godspeed, my son,” and he held out a thin, 
waxen hand. 

Selby took it in his own, and there was much 
of reverence in his warm, grateful handclasp. 

“It will be my life’s care, if she chooses me, 
that she never has cause to regret her choice,” 
he said, almost solemnly. 

The old man smiled wanly, for he was very 
tired, and Selby left him to rest and went in 
search of the mistress of the plantation house. 
He found her in the dim old hall, curled in the 
corner of a big sofa, tears of bitter grief 
streaming over her pale cheeks, a bit of soiled 
and crumpled paper in her lap, and Countess, 
the old collie, crouched at her feet emitting 
very human whimpers of grieving sympathy. 

Selby knelt beside the girl, taking one of her 

[ 177 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


cold hands in his and laying the other on the 
soft brown head of the sorrowing old dog. 

“What has hurt you, my girl?” he asked. 
“Tell me.” And he gently pulled her head to 
the hollow of his shoulder. 

“My brother,” wailed Elise distressfully. 
“My poor, poor brother ! How sorry I am that 
we ever found the gold!” and she struck the 
paper on her knee with her free hand. 

Selby gently pulled the paper from her fin- 
gers and read the little scrawl, his bronzed face 
whitening curiously. 

“Oh!” Elise cried, pushing Selby aside, “we 
must do something ! ’ ’ and she got hastily to her 
feet. 

“There is nothing we can do now,” he said, 
pointing to the date on the note. “Ravenell is 
now somewhere near the coast of France. Evi- 
dently his messenger loitered on the way.” 

“Grandfather will know. Here is a note for 
him also. We must tell him. ” 

With his arm about her shoulders Selby led 
Elise to the invalid’s room. She gave him the 
crumpled notes silently, sobbing bitterly as he 
read them. After a time the Colonel looked at 
his granddaughter, the look one sees in the 

[ 178 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


glance of a hurt child or in that of the very aged 
who grieve, in his old eyes. 

“Do not grieve so, my child,” he said gently. 
“Ravenell has seen his duty and has the man- 
hood to follow where it led. The Ravenells 
were ever soldiers — soldiers before every- 
thing.” 

The ring of pride in his voice comforted 
Elise. She controlled her grief bravely and 
dried her eyes. “How shall we ever tell him 
we have found his gold?” she asked sadly. 

‘ ‘ The gold is not particularly and exclusively 
Ravenell ’s,” the Colonel reminded her a trifle 
sternly. “Perhaps it was the hand of God 
which prevented his discovering what might re- 
sult in greater grief and disappointment. 
Ravenell shall receive his just portion.” 

Selby was silent, for how could he apprise the 
grieving girl of her brother’s often expressed 
intentions regarding the old treasure? 

He led her, followed by the old collie, from 
the room and did his utmost to comfort both. 


[ 179 ] 


CHAPTER XXI 


T he neat maid tapped at Miss Vannes’ 
door and, being bidden to enter, care- 
fully insinuated herself between the huge, 
cumbersome dresser and the austere single 
bed. There was just clear space sufficient 
for her to enter and lay the breakfast tray she 
carried before Aline on the flowered coverlid. 

The tiny tray held a steaming cup of black 
coffee, a small roll and a letter with a neat busi- 
ness address in one corner. Miss Vannes 
regarded the breakfast tray languidly, but when 
the maid had departed, and before tasting 
either coffee or roll, she investigated the con- 
tents of the letter. 

A moment sufficed, for the communication 
was brief and to the point. Mr. Selby’s compli- 
ments — by the hand of his private secretary — 
who had the pleasure of enclosing the amount 
therein. Aline held the crisp pink slip at arm’s 
length between dainty finger and thumb, her lip 
curling disdainfully with the humor of her 
mind. She studied the bit of paper a long 
while, then let it fall to the counterpane. 

[ 180 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“Boor,” she remarked scornfully to no one 
in particular, “unmannerly boor!” and turned 
her attention to the neglected breakfast tray. 

When she had sipped the last drop of black 
coffee and devoured the roll to the final crumb 
Aline placed the tray on the floor beside the 
bed, threw aside the covers and pattered in 
bare, pink feet across the hall to the bath. 

Miss Vannes’ morning bath was a ceremony 
and a rite, and after an hour of hot massage, 
cold spray and perfumed sponging she emerged 
and was ready to invest her beautiful person 
with the dainty and delicate garments she so 
well became. 

Another hour, and blue serge tailor-gowned, 
patent leather shod and crowned with a marvel 
of a toque fashioned from the irridescent 
breasts of grebe, she was ready to fare forth. 

Aline was accustomed to the plebeian exer- 
cise of walking and covered the ground at a 
swinging gait which tinted her cheeks softly 
and lent a sparkle to her fine eyes, but when 
within a short distance of her destination she 
called a taxi and rolled in state to the door of 
old “Iron” Selby’s office. 

Her card, presented with a friendly and en- 
gaging smile for the young watchdog whose 

[ 181 ] 


SPIEIT GOLD 


duty it was to guard the portals which shielded 
the “Iron King” from undesired interruption, 
earned her the courtesy of a chair inside the 
private railing where she rested gratefully un- 
til the clerk returned, which he did presently, 
to bow her into the august presence; and had 
she been aware of the honor bestowed upon her 
so readily for the mere asking, her feeling 
would have been one of high elation indeed, for 
seldom were the feet of women permitted to 
press the costly rug of old “Iron” Selby’s 
office floor. 

Aline gave the old man a friendly, engaging 
smile, and offered him a cool, slim hand, pro- 
ceeding immediately to the business which ac- 
counted for her presence there. 

“I found a check from your office in my mail 
this morning, Mr. Selby, and as I had an errand 
in this neighborhood I thought I would return 
it in person, then I could ask if you have had 
any news of your son.” 

Old Selby glanced at the young woman with 
white-eyed furtiveness. “No, madam, no 
news,” he lied dryly. “I offered the reward 
for the information you gave me.” 

Aline smiled patiently, Selby’s reply con- 
firming her shrewd suspicion that her informa- 
[ 182 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


tion had been thoroughly investigated before 
the check had been mailed. “But I gave you 
the information, Mr. Selby. Your son is my 
friend and I judged your knowledge of his 
whereabouts would benefit him,” and Aline laid 
the check upon the desk. 

‘ ‘ Hah ! ’ ’ Here was something new under the 
sun of old Selby’s experience; some one giving 
him something he desired for nothing, turning 
back easy money he had given away. Under 
the naive friendliness of Miss Vannes’ lustrous 
eyes the hard shell of his nature thawed a trifle 
and he smiled at the young woman in awkward 
unaccustomed playfulness. 

“Keep the check. Miss Vannes. If not for 
yourself, do something for somebody with it 
for me. Women know about these things — I 
am too busy to bother — some pet charity, now? 
Pray keep the check, young lady.” 

“Well, if you insist, Mr. Selby, thank you. 
There is so much to do with money — so 
many — ” Aline sighed and there were real 
tears in her beautiful eyes, not lustrous and 
languid now, but sad and infinitely alluring. 

‘ ‘ Hah ! I dare say, ’ ’ old Selby agreed gruffly 
and pushed the pink slip toward her. 

The faint, elusive spirit of fragrance that 


[ 183 ] 


SPIKIT GOLD 


was Aline Vannes’ atmosphere lingered hours 
after her departure, distracting and disturbing 
the hardshell old business man, the sympa- 
thetic eyes, exotic in their almost oriental love- 
liness, swum before the terse phrases of his 
mail, and her smile, womanly, gentle, joyous 
and girlishly ingenuous, flashed through his 
consciousness, distracting his mind from the 
grave detail of money-getting. 

A few mornings after Aline ’s visit to old 
Selby’s office the old fellow, deep in pestering 
matters of business, suddenly pushed the papers 
from him and pressed the button that called his 
private secretary. Indeed, so long and per- 
emptorily did he press that that young man 
lost a goodly portion of his accustomed stony 
dignity in his haste to answer. As he entered 
the private office old Selby barked : 

“Get every possible detail of information 
about this party,” and pushed a card scrawled 
with the name “Vannes” at the relieved secre- 
tary. In an incredibly short time the man re- 
turned with the information typed and laid it 
on old Selby’s desk. 

“Major Junius J. Vannes, Stocks and 
Bonds,” with the address of a modest club. 

To will was to do with old “Iron” Selby and 

[ 184 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


lunch time found him worrying a chop and try- 
ing to enjoy a salad in the grill of that modest 
club, with his guest, a white-mustached, goateed 
old fellow who might have posed for a picture 
of the accepted conception of the Old South, 
enjoying the same frugal fare and talking 
largely of “deals” and “corners.” 

“Hah! You are from the South, Major?” old 
Selby remarked casually in the moments after 
luncheon when the good tobacco burned freely. 
“Ever hear of a place called Santee?” 

The Major pricked interested ears. “The 
Santee ? Finest rice country in the world, suh. 
It is my native heath,” and much lurid praise 
of that particular corner of the United States 
followed. 

Listening patiently, old “Iron” Selby gath- 
ered the information he desired from the 
Major’s florid praise, and before they parted 
Mr. Selby had given, and Major Vannes ac- 
cepted an invitation for a trip aboard the Echo, 
Selby’s private yacht, to that wonderland of 
Major Vannes’ nativity. 

And, contrary to his custom, the Major sur- 
prised his daughter with his appearance at din- 
ner that evening at the flat in 63rd street, west 


[ 186 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


of the park. His news was far too exciting to 
keep until breakfast. 

“I told him, my deah, I knew the Santee like 
the pa’m of my own hand,” he said in conclu- 
sion, and almost forgot in his anticipated 
pleasure of returning in state aboard a private 
yacht, although the property of another, to his 
native heath, the real cause and front of the in- 
vitation. 

“Mr. Selby kindly included my wife in the 
invitation, ’ ’ he related as an afterthought, ‘ ‘ and 
when I told him your angel mother was sleep- 
ing long since in the Vannes cemetery in the 
Santee, but that her beautiful image in the per- 
son of a lovely daughter gladdened my de- 
clining years, he was kind enough to insist that 
you make one of the party. My deah, would 
you care to return so soon?” 

Miss Vannes considered a moment. “I 
might,” she said indifferently; “a trip aboard 
a yacht like Mr. Selby’s would not be very 
trying.” 

“But — frocks, my deah,” the Major sug- 
gested, the anxiety of supplying the beautiful 
image of his angel wife with sufficient funds to 
furnish the sartorial setting her loveliness de- 
manded uppermost. 


[ 186 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


“Oh,” carelessly, “what I have will do. Mr. 
Selby is far too old to criticise the deficiencies 
of a young woman’s wardrobe.” 

“Quite so, quite so, my deah,” the Major 
agreed with a relieved sigh, and so the matter 
was settled. 


[ 187 ] 


CHAPTER XXII 


O N the plea of his failing health Colonel 
Ravenell urged an early marriage for 
his granddaughter. 

“I am not getting younger,” he said to Selby, 
‘‘and it is my dearest wish to see her happily 
protected before I am called.” 

The wedding, therefore, must be a simple and 
quiet one, and when the day was decided upon 
negroes in bateaux travelled the water lanes of 
the* rice fields and others on horseback carried 
the happy news of the approaching marriage 
at Little Canes to friends and connections 
throughout the Santee. 

Groups of lively young people appeared at 
the plantation house, their finery carried in 
baskets and bundles ; they arrived by boat and 
on horseback and the big mansion awoke to 
their happy laughter. 

Aunt Ellen Lou installed herself as mistress 
of ceremonies and dragon-in-chief to the bevy 
of young women, baking the wedding cake with 
her own claw-like hands, than none in the San- 
tee had more cunning in such matters, but much 


[ 188 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


to the disgust of old Bet, who had assisted at 
the cake-baking of three generations of Raven- 
ell brides, and who, when Aunt Ellen Lou had 
baked and iced to her own satisfaction and set 
the product of her industry away to grace the 
wedding feast, arose in the early dawn of the 
marriage morning and baked such a marvel of 
a bride cake that Elise declared that it and no 
other should have the place of honor on the 
bride ’s table. 

The ceremony was to be performed in the big 
hall of the mansion which was turned into a 
woodland vista with trailing vines and dwarfed 
trees lifted bodily from their habitat in the cool 
woods. There was much flirting and merry- 
making and happy bustle, but underneath a 
chord of sadness stirred the hearts of the two 
whose approaching nuptials occasioned all the 
frolic and gayety. 

Elise still grieved that Ravenell would not be 
there, was not there to rejoice with them in 
their happiness and in the recovery of the long- 
lost gold. Selby ’s happiness, which he bore with 
a quiet bordering on reverence, was clouded 
with a bitterness of regret that the hand he 
would give to his bride on the marriage day 
was stained with the blood of a fellow man. 


[ 189 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Old Bet fished from the far end of the 
dilapidated pier jutting into the boiling river. 
Flood tide was beginning and the fish did not 
bite as readily as they had earlier in the day. 
Fishing and smoking, she had perched there 
many hours, a dark, ragged bundle of patience, 
filling a large basket with silvery fish for the 
plantation-house breakfast table. Her basket 
was full to overflowing, but with the negro im- 
pulse to draw just a little more from any 
bounty, no matter if the added portion is a 
superfluity and utterly unneeded, she angled 
anxiously for just another sweet young mullet, 
schools of which swarmed the boiling stream. 

Shades of approaching afternoon were begin- 
ning to creep between the stems of the giant 
cedars and slim, black trunks of the fragrant 
bays when sharp put-putting awoke the brood- 
ing shadows of the swamp, driving the water- 
fowl in clouds up the lighter reaches of the 
river. The old negress thought it a party 
of Little Canes guests returning from a pleas- 
ure trip in the plantation launch, but a second 
glance convinced her that she was mistaken, for 
the Little Canes launch boasted no such snowy 
paint or glittering brass as the boat which shot 
so swiftly toward the pier. 

[ 190 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


Evidently more guests for the plantation 
house, and shouldering her basket of fish she 
trudged hastily home to acquaint the family of 
the threatened invasion. 

“Plenty Buckra coom on de ribber,” she in- 
formed Aunt Ellen Lou who was busy in the 
kitchen. “Mooch Buckra mons an’ ooman,” 
and she gestured largely toward the pier. 

Aunt Ellen Lou carried the news of the arriv- 
ing guests to Elise who with Selby and a group 
of girl friends started toward the river. When 
they reached the terraces the little party were 
mounting the wide sweep of steps, and Elise 
recognizing Miss Vannes flew to welcome her 
friend. The presence of the Major was an 
added pleasure and he was cordially welcomed 
and acquainted with the happy event in pros- 
pect. His florid compliments and felicitation 
over he turned to the large stranger hovering 
in the background. 

“My friend, Mr. Selby senior, my dear — per- 
mit me the honor. Miss Ravenell,” and the 
punctilious old Major performed the introduc- 
tion with much secret relish. 

Old “Iron” Selby held out a thick hand, his 
white glance boring the background where 
John Buford lingered. “Isn’t that young ras- 


[ 191 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


cal there my son?” he enquired with bluff 
heartiness. 

John Buford strode forward. “Father!” he 
said, offering his hand in happy surprise. 

Selby senior grasped his son’s hand closely, 
and John Buford knew by the something flicker- 
ing alive on the cold surface of his father’s eyes 
that their differences had been forgiven. 

“So we have blundered into a wedding 
party,” he said genially. “I hope it is a case 
of the more the merrier. What do you say, 
young lady,” turning to Aline, “to a double- 
barrel wedding?” Aline flushed divinely but 
made no reply, and turning to the others who 
stood in mute surprise he explained : 

“This lady has consented to become my wife. 
The announcement, coming from me, is a trifle 
premature, but if she is willing the one minister 
can do the two jobs at one and the same time. 
Eh, Major?” 

“If my daughter is satisfied I have no objec- 
tions to offer,” the Major put himself on 
record. 

“Oh, Aline, how lovely! Please do!” and 
Elise kissed her friend warmly. 

Aline yielded gracefully. On the trip aboard 
the luxurious yacht her charm had quite won 

[ 192 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


the hard-shelled old money-getter. Her filial 
solicitude and untiring thoughtfulness of the 
Major’s comfort, her grace, beauty and winning 
social aplomb charmed the old “Iron King,” 
who was never uncertain as to what he wanted 
and never lost valuable time in acquiring it. 
All his worldly possessions were the best of 
their kind money could produce or buy, and no 
one he had ever seen could do greater honor to 
his taste and judgment than the young woman 
before him. With quiet, business-like dignity 
Aline had accepted him, and now prettily signi- 
fied her willingness to become his wife at the 
same time her dearest friend became her step- 
daughter. 

In happy reunion the little party walked 
up the terrace, Selby’s arm linked in that of his 
son. The young women, arms entwined, lin- 
gered in the rear. 

“And so you came to my way of thinking at 
last, young sir,” he remarked jovially to John 
Buford. 

“Your way? In what? Father, I — ” 

“In women — girls,” the old man laughed. 
“The girl you are going to marry tomorrow is 
the girl I picked for you and whom you would 
have none of. All around Dick’s hatband to 


[ 193 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


come to your milk at last!” and he chuckled 
wickedly. 

There was a new formation as the party 
reached the door. Selby and the Major went to 
the Colonel’s room where they received a hearty 
welcome. Aline and John Buford remained 
alone on the terrace. 

“And Van der Spool?” Selby asked her. 
“Aline, you do not regret him?” 

Aline pouted prettily. “Van der Spool? 
Do you think, John Buford, I ever seriously 
considered him?” 

“I did not know. You told me — ” 

“I told you that I must marry what the world 
calls well. Some one with more wit than you 
or me has said ‘All’s well that ends well.’ Van 
der Spool will marry his cousin, Hilda Van 
Zoom, next month. ’ ’ 

“Then he is not — ” Suddenly a great light 
burst on John Buford’s understanding. He 
was not a murderer. His blow had not actually 
deprived Van der Spool of his life. He re- 
called the game of cross purposes with Aline in 
the deserted negro cemetery. She had not 
known, did not know the real cause of his flight 
and hiding in the Santee. He bit his lip and 

[ 194 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


listened, for she was speaking with half-of- 
fended petulance. 

“No, he was not engaged to me. There never 
was anything to it but mad infatuation on his 
part. Van der Spool is a natural fool.” 

John Buford laughed joyously. “Right you 
are, mamma-to-be — am I to call you mamma 
after tomorrow. Aline?” 

There was a double wedding next day in the 
wide, dim hall of the old plantation house. 
Neither bridesmaids nor groomsmen after the 
accepted order of these events preceded the 
happy couples to the altar, but they were quite 
surrounded by a bevy of sympathetic friends. 
One friend, old Countess, usurped the place of 
maid or matron of honor had there been one, 
walking with all the calm dignity of a real 
countess, her pretty tulip ears laid back against 
her curling ruff, her large plumy tail gently 
nodding. She preceded the little cortege to the 
improvised altar and sat in state by the side of 
her young mistress while she took her solemn 
marriage vows. 

It was a beautiful picture which held in the 
fine old hall of the plantation house for a short 
space. Two beautiful women taking the sol- 
emn vows that made them wives, one in the 


[ 195 ] 


SPIRIT GOLD 


great love she bore the man she loved above all 
others and would soon call husband, the other in 
the rite which gave her in full measure all that 
she valued far above the passing love of man. 

As they stood the ardent yellow sunshine of 
the Santee beamed through the stained glass of 
the tall windows, scattered by the lacy foliage 
of the twining vines, transfiguring the grave 
faces of the human figures in the picture and 
lying like a benediction on the soft, curling coat 
of the gentle old dog, spirit gold which gilded 
their path from the marriage altar to a new and 
happy life. 


B a 7. 


[ 196 ] 


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